"An' her dersarves it, kase her's a big fool," said Edny Ann, "hangin'
roun' him, an' patchin' his cloze like her wus morred ter 'im--an' washin'
his shut an' britches ev'ry Saddy night."

All the hands were required to stop after the weighing and witness the
floggings, as a warning to themselves and an enhancement of punishment to
the convicts. There was but little shrinking from the sight. Human nature
is everywhere much the same: cruel spectacles brutalize, whether in Spain
or on a negro-plantation. But to-night there was a new sensation: the
slaves were on the _qui vive_ to see Little Lizay flogged, and to find out
whose hand was to wield the whip.

"Now hurry up yere, yer lazy raskels! an' git yer floggin'," Mr. Buck said
when the weighing was over.

From right and left and front and rear negroes came forward and stood, a
motley group, before the one white man. It was a weird spectacle that did
not seem to belong to our earth. Black faces, heads above heads, crowded at
the doorway--some solemn and sympathetic, others grinning in anticipation
of the show. Negroes were perched on the gin and in the corners of the loft
where the cotton was heaped. Others lay at full length close to the field
of action. In every direction the dusky figures dotted the cotton lying on
every hand about the little cleared space where the flogging and weighing
were done. In a close bunch stood the shrinking, cowering convicts, some
with heads white as the cotton all about them. Mr. Buck, the most
picturesque figure of the whole, was laying off his coat and baring his
arm, standing under the solitary lamp depending from the rafters, whose
faint light served to give to all the scene an indefinite supernatural
aspect.