"'She's ready,' I says, puttin' her outside. And then I shet the do'. I heared the overseer--it was him that had come with the man--say, 'Well, she don't seem to take on much,' and the nigger-trader, he says, 'Naw, they don't have no feelin' for their chil'n.'" She stopped. Apparently the story was at an end. "Oh, Mammy Cely!" cried Margaret, wringing her hands, "don't tell me you never saw her any more!" "Miss Margaret, I never laid eyes on her from that day to this. I don't know where they took her or what they did with her any more than ef the ground had opened and swallowed her up." "Oh, I am glad, _glad_ that never can be done again!" cried Margaret, vehemently. "It was a wicked thing to put so much power in any man's hands!" She looked down at her own sleeping child with a sudden sinking of the heart, and then into the impassive face of the black woman. "Oh, Mammy Cely! I think God has forgotten us!" "Honey, don't say that. He don't forget!" Then, modifying this statement, "But it certainly do look lak His remembry is a heap better for men than what it is for women." CHAPTER XV INSTINCT TRIUMPHS Mammy Cely's story made a deep impression on Margaret in her excited state of mind. She could not sleep for thinking of it. If the whole gamut of human experiences had been run, nothing would have appealed to her like this. The iniquity of the thing struck her with a force that was almost staggering. She had come of generations of slave-owners who had never known anything else than to accept conditions as they found them and do for their dependent ones the best they could. That such heart-breaking tragedies as this had ever taken place among them had never occurred to her. Personally, of course, she had seen nothing of slavery, but she had spent her life in the midst of the negroes of Washington, who seemed so irresponsible, so given to carousings, so prone to appear in the police courts, that she had never thought of them as possessing the deeper feelings of human nature. They seemed a people apart. The sad little story to which she had listened revealed the truth. God had made all women's hearts alike, and _then_ had designated the color of their skins--_then_ had placed them in stations high or low--_then_ had made them bond or free. And when He made them mothers He touched them all with a coal from the same altar. But it was not alone the pathos of the story, deep and tragic as that was, that kept her night after night with wide-open eyes staring into the darkness.