Beadle's Dime Novels No. 33: Maum Guinea and Her Plantation Children — page 22: what you’re looking at

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

16 - 4 MAUM GUINEA. these were gathered all the aged and rheumatic, whose dancing days were over, toasting their unshapely feet at the glowing embers, and looking on at the more active revelers. The air was almost balmy, soft as spring, but damp enough to make the warmth of the blaze welcame to those who were not exercising. Fantastic as the flames whose light played and quivered around them, were the groups which they revealed — uncouth creatures, the most of them, even the younger ones; while the old seemed more like caricatures of | humanity than realities. Yet all of them—the young and stout, and the old, distorted by hard labor beyond their natural ugliness, branded by servitude, withered by years— were as gay and free from care as a meeting of chattering apes in a Bornean forest. They had none of them lost that rich capacity for enjoyment which is the boon and blessing of week’s holiday, the warmth of the fire and the exhilaration of the music. Each one had received a new suit that very day; the homely cotton gowns and trowsers were new, as were the shoes; and some were bedecked with turbans, gor- geous as the poppies of the Orient. And some of the dandies ° —for even among field-hands on a sugar-plantation, there are . dandies—flowered out in yests of superfluous brilliancy, which | Aodhan sts. ahem . spending-money. | ) Perched Gu. Some ob Sek diabetes ea ie an old negro with white wool and wrinkled face, who eyi- | dently felt the importance of his position, for he rosined his bow, and screeched it across the strings, until the anticipation of the dancers was wrought to a pitch with his highest note. The red hue of the fire gave a weird glow to the rolling eyes, and shining faces; the soft, oily chuckle of the girls and the easy laugh of their partners sounded pleasantly on the air. cGomicloooks.conn