Page:The White Slave, or Memoirs of a Fugitive.djvu/106

 auctioneer's hammer struck the table, grinned a significant smile, and said he believed the girl was yet able to handle a hoe; — any how, he would get one summer's work out of her. The old lady had scarcely held up her head since the death of her master; but she forgot all her sorrows, she forgot even to deplore the lot that seemed to await her, in her anger at being sold at so small a price. She turned to her purchaser, and with an indignant air, told him that she was both younger and stronger than folks thought for, and assured him that he had made the best bargain of any of the company. The old fellow chuckled, but said nothing. It was easy to read his thoughts. He was evidently resolving to hold the old woman to her word.

Some of the old and decrepit slaves could not be sold at all. They were not worth purchasing, and nobody would take an offer. I do not know what became of them.

The slave-dealer who had purchased most of the children, declined buying such of the mothers as were past the age of child-bearing. The parting of these mothers from their children, was a new scene of misery and lamentation. The poor things, snatched a little while before, from the home of their birth and their infancy, and now, torn from the mothers that bore and nursed them, clasped their little hands, and shrieked with all the unrestrained vehemence of infant agony. The mothers wept too; but their grief was more subdued. There was one old woman, the mother, she said, of fifteen children. One little girl, about ten or twelve years old, was all that remained to her. The others had been sold and scattered, she knew not whither. She was now to part from her youngest and only remaining child. The little girl clung to her mother's dress with all the terror of one who was about to be kidnapped, and her screams and cries might have touched a heart of stone. Her new master snatched the child away, hit her a cut with his whip, and bade her hold her "cursed clatter." A slave-trader, however he may have the exterior of a gentleman, is in fact, the same ferocious barbarian, whether on the coast of Guinea, or in the heart of the ‘Ancient Dominion.'

When our new master had completed his purchases, he prepared to set out with his drove. He was one of a