(signature) Jacob Abbott.
Christine.
"O, these childen, how they do lie round our hearts."—Milly Edmondson.
The clock struck the appointed hour, and the sale commenced. Articles of household furniture, horses, carts, and slaves, were waiting together to be sold to the highest bidder. For strange as it would seem in another land than this, beneath the ample folds of the "Star-spangled Banner," human sinews were to be bought and sold. Bodies, such as the Apostle called the "temples of the Holy Ghost," in which dwelt souls for which Christ died;—men, women and little children, made in the image of God, were classed with marketable commodities, to be sold by the pound, like dumb beasts in the shambles. Husbands would be torn from their wives, mothers from their children, and all from everything they loved most dearly.
The group of human chattels excited great interest among the lookers-on, for they were a choice lot of prime negroes, and rumor said that he would get a rare bargain who bought that day.
It was a saddening sight, that dusky group, whose only crime was being
"—— guilty of a skin
Not colored like our own,"