Page:Olney Hymns - 1840.djvu/10

 of a merchantman for one more likely to serve his Majesty. From Madeira he was brought to the little island above-mentioned, where, quitting the vessel, he entered into the service of an English speculator in the trade of that coast a broker in blood, buying and selling men, woman, and children, on such terms, and for such profits, as could be made in that lottery of inhuman adventure. His master, though a slave-dealer, was himself the slave, by brutal passion, of a black woman, who lived with him as his wife, and ruled over his household with a tyranny not surpassed by a native driver, with his cart-whip, in the sugar islands.

How our renegade stripling, at an age when youth and ill health might have softened the heart of the least compassionate of the gentler sex, came to be so much out of favour with his mistress, has not been told by himself, but her cruelty has, and the record will not soon be effaced from his pages, though thousands of wretches like him may have suffered as much, under similar circumstances, whose wrongs and oppressions ceased from the earth with themselves, and were written in no book but that out of which the dead as well as the living shall be judged at the last day. His miseries, however, have been preserved by enduring memorials, perhaps as examples of the horrible re-action and vengeance on the spot, and in the persons of the perpetrators, which, even in this world, accompany the practice of that unexpiated crime against God and man, in which civilized nations have been engaged for more than three centuries that crime of Christendom, which has robbed Africa of millions of her offspring, peopled the West Indies with a perishing population beyond the power of nature to renew, and brought upon Europe judgments,