child!  Yes, that offspring in which her hopes were centered!  For it she pleaded and pleaded; for it she offered to sacrifice her own happiness; for it she invoked the all-protecting hand.  That child, doomed to a life of chattel misery; to serve the lusts of modern barbarism in a country where freedom and civilization sound praises from ocean to ocean; to be obscured in the darkness and cruelty of an institution in which justice is scoffed, where distress has no listeners, and the trap-keepers of men’s souls scorn to make honest recompense while human flesh and blood are weighed in the scale of dollars and cents!  He trembles before the sad picture; remonstrances and entreaties from him will be in vain; nor can he seize them and carry them off.  His life might be forfeited in the attempt, even were they without prison walls.  No! it is almost hopeless.  In the narrow confines of a securely grated cell, where thoughts and anxieties waste the soul in disappointment, and where hopes only come and go to spread time with grief, he could only see her and her child as they suffered.  The spectacle had no charm; and those who carried them into captivity for the satisfaction of paltry debts could not be made to divest themselves of the self in nature.  Cries and sobs were nothing,—­such were poor stock for “niggers” to have; pains and anxieties were at a discount, chivalry proclaimed its rule, and nothing was thought well of that lessened the market value of body and soul.  Among great, generous, hospitable, and chivalrous men, such things could only be weighed in the common scale of trade.

Again, Maxwell remembered that Marston had unfolded his troubles to him, and being a mere stranger the confidence warranted mutual reciprocity.  If it were merely an act dictated by the impulse of his feelings at that moment, the secret was now laid broadly open.  He was father of the children, and, sensible of their critical situation, the sting was goading him to their rescue.  The question was-would he interpose and declare them as such?  Ah, he forgot it was not the father’s assertion,—­it was the law.  The crime of being property was inherited from the mother.  Acknowledging them his children would neither satisfy law nor the creditors.  What honourable-we except the modernly chivalrous-man would see his children jostled by the ruffian trader?  What man, with feelings less sensitive than iron, would see his child sold to the man-vender for purposes so impious that heaven and earth frowned upon them?  And yet the scene was no uncommon one; slavery affords the medium, and men, laying their hearts aside, make it serve their pockets.  Those whom it would insult to call less than gentlemen have covered their scruples with the law, while consigning their own offspring to the hand of an auctioneer.  Man property is subvervient material,—­woman is even more; for where her virtue forms its tissues, and can be sold, the issue is indeed deplorable.  Again, where