Beadle's Dime Novels No. 3: Myra, the Child of Adoption — page 13: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

THE CHILD OF ADOPTION. 11 _ she might have seemed stricken dead in the midst of her an- guish. He returned to the couch. “ Zulima, would you kiss the babe before it goes !” “JT dare not—I dare not,” broke from those pale lips; then Zulima held back her sobs, for his footsteps were departing—a door closed—husband and child both were gone. Then the mother’s anguish broke forth, her arms were flung upward, her quivering hands clasped wildly together—a moment and they fell heavily upon the orange flowers that still littered the bed, crushing them in her utter insensibility. Then, while the young wife lay so pale and deathly there stole toward the bed that negro woman, who bent down till the bright Madras *kerchief turbaning her forehead mingled with the chestnut tresses that lay scattered over the shoulder and bo- som of the sufferer. She listened a moment, as if to make her- self quite certain that what seemed so deathly was not death itself, and then glided from the chamber. The negress stole softly through the open hall, and into a spacious garden; a row of small white buildings stood at the farther extremity, gleaming in snowy patches through the vines and trees that embowered that portion of the garden. These were the slaye dwellings belonging to a rich plantation some three miles from New Orleans—belonging to the husband of Zulima, and occupied for a season by his bosom friend that the infancy of his child might be honorably sheltered. And here in a little whitewashed room of the slave dwelling this bo- som friend was impatiently watching the approach of the male slave whom he had placed—a dark spy—in the bed ber of that helpless young wife. With his face close to one of the four panes of glass that admitted light to the humble room, he watched the fiery colors of the Madras turban, which the woman always wore, as it glided like some gorgeous bird through the thick foliage, nearer and nearer to the den where he had for two hours been waiting for news from the sick- chamber. The slave entered her dwelling, and sat down be- fore her master, full of that consequential assumption that a lit- eS ee call forth in one of her ignorant and de- “ Well, Louisa,” said the master, with a show of careless in- ' difference, for he was of a cool and subtle temperament, with ae : Ec, 4 -