Page:Ballantyne--The Pirate City.djvu/413

Rh The assembling on the decks of the ships of war of these victims of barbaric cruelty, ignorance, and superstition, was a sight that raised powerful and conflicting feelings in the breasts of those who witnessed it. The varied feelings of the slaves were, to some extent, expressed by their actions and in their faces. Old and young were there, of almost every nation; gentle and simple, robust and feeble; men, women, and children. Some, on coming on board, cheered with joy, but these were few, and consisted chiefly of men who had not been long enslaved, and had not suffered much. Others wept with delight, fell on their knees and kissed the decks, or returned thanks to God for deliverance. Some were carried on board, being too ill, or too broken down, to walk. Many appeared to regard the whole affair as a dream, too good to be true, from which they must soon awake—as they had often awaked before—after their uneasy slumbers in the dreadful Bagnio. But the saddest sights of all were the men and women, here and there among the crowd, whose prolonged condition of slavery—in many cases ten, twenty, even thirty years—had rendered them callous as well to joy as to sorrow. Taken in youth, they were now old. What was freedom to them? It did indeed deliver them from the lash and from constant toil, but it could not return to them the years that were gone; it could not recall the beloved dead, who had, perchance,