The sale was almost over, and we were just about to leave, when a howl of derision from the mob made us look round.  What I saw was the apparition of an extremely aged and debilitated black man standing on the table.  What Moore saw to interest him I could not guess, but he grew pale and uttered an oath of surprise under his breath, though he rarely swore.  Then he turned his horse’s head again towards the auctioneer.  That merry tradesman was extolling the merits of nearly his last lot.  “A very remarkable specimen, gentlemen!  Admirers of the antique cannot dispense with this curious nigger—­very old and quite imperfect.  Like so many of the treasures of Greek art which have reached us, he has had the misfortune to lose his nose and several of his fingers.  How much offered for this exceptional lot—­unmarried and without encumbrances of any kind?  He is dumb too, and may be trusted with any secret.”

“Take him off!” howled some one in the crowd.

“Order his funeral!”

“Chuck him into the next lot.”

“What, gentlemen, no bids for this very eligible nigger?  With a few more rags he would make a most adequate scarecrow.”

While this disgusting banter was going on I observed a planter ride up to one of the brokers and whisper for some time in his ear.  The planter was a bad but unmistakable likeness of my friend Moore, worked over, so to speak, with a loaded brush and heavily glazed with old Bourbon whisky.  After giving his orders to the agent he retired to the outskirts of the crowd, and began flicking his long dusty boots with a serviceable cowhide whip.

“Well, gentlemen, we must really adopt the friendly suggestion of Judge Lee and chuck this nigger into the next lot.”

So the auctioneer was saying, when the broker to whom I have referred cried out, “Ten dollars.”

“This is more like business,” cried the auctioneer.  “Ten dollars offered!  What amateur says more than ten dollars for this lot?  His extreme age and historical reminiscences alone, if he could communicate them, would make him invaluable to the student.”

To my intense amazement Moore shouted from horseback, “Twenty dollars.”

“What, you want a cheap nigger to get your hand in, do you, you blank-blanked abolitionist?” cried a man who stood near.  He was a big, dirty-looking bully, at least half drunk, and attending (not unnecessarily) to his toilet with the point of a long, heavy knife.

Before the words were out of his mouth Moore had leaped from his horse and delivered such a right-handed blow as that wherewith the wandering beggar-man smote Irus of old in the courtyard of Odysseus, Laertes’ son.  “On his neck, beneath the ear, he smote him, and crushed in the bones; and the red blood gushed up through his mouth, and he gnashed his teeth together as he kicked the ground.”  Moore stooped, picked up the bowie-knife, and sent it glittering high through the air.