"Here, hold up yer foot, Ben, or you shan't hab any meat fur breakus." This threat was addressed to her young brother, whom she nursed like a baby, and whose tiny foot seemed to resist the restraint of a shoe. I looked long at them, and mused with a strange sorrow upon their probable destiny. Bitter I knew it must be. For, where is there, beneath the broad sweep of the majestic heavens, a single one of the dusky tribe of Ethiopia who has not felt that existence was to him far more a curse than a blessing? You, oh, my tawny brothers, who read these tear-stained pages, ask your own hearts, which, perhaps, now ache almost to bursting, ask, I say, your own vulture-torn hearts, if life is not a hard, hard burden? Have you not oftentimes prayed to the All-Merciful to sever the mystic tie that bound you here, to loosen your chains and set you, soul and body, free? Have you not, from the broken chinks of your lonely cabins at night, looked forth upon the free heavens, and murmured at your fate? Is there, oh! slave, in your heart a single pleasant memory? Do you not, captive-husband, recollect with choking pride how the wife of your bosom has been cruelly lashed while you dared not say one word in her defence? Have you not seen your children, precious pledges of undying love, ruthlessly torn from you, bound hand and foot and sold like dogs in the slave market, while you dared not offer a single remonstrance? Has not every social and moral feeling been outraged? Is it not the white man's policy to degrade your race, thereby finding an argument to favor the perpetuation of Slavery? Is there for us one thing to sweeten bondage? Free African! in the brave old States of the North, where the shackles of slavery exist not, to you I call. Noble defenders of Abolition, you whose earnest eyes may scan these pages, I call to you with a _tearful voice_; I pray you to go on in your glorious cause; flag not, faint not, prosecute it before heaven and against man. Fling out your banners and march on to the defence of the suffering ones at the South. And you, oh my heart-broken sisters, toiling beneath a tropic sun, wearing out your lives in the service of tyrants, to you I say, hope and pray still! Trust in God! He is mighty and willing to save, and, in an hour that you know not of, he will roll the stone away from the portal of your hearts. My prayers are with you and for you. I have come up from the same tribulation, and I vow, by the sears and wounds upon my flesh, never to forget your cause. Would that my tears, which freely flow for you, had power to dissolve the fetters of your wasting bondage.