Even the story of St. Vincent de Paul, so brutally sold in the public square, is not without gleam of light. He was bought by a fisherman, who was soon constrained to get rid of him, "having nothing so contrary except the sea." He then passed into the hands of an old man, whom he pleasantly describes as a chemical doctor, a sovereign extractor of quintessences, very humane and kind, who had labored for the space of fifty years in search of the philosopher's stone. "He loved me very much," says the fugitive slave, "and pleased himself by discoursing to me of alchemy, and then of his religion, to which he made every effort to draw me, promising me abundant riches and all his learning." On the death of this master he passed to a nephew, by whom he was sold to still another person, a renegade from Nice, who took him to the mountains, where the country was extremely hot and desert. The Turkish wife of the latter, becoming interested in him, and curious to know his manner of living at home, came to see him every day at his work in the fields, and listened with delight to the slave, away from his country and the churches of his religion, as he sang the psalm of the children of Israel in a foreign land: "By the rivers of Babylon there we sat down; yea, we wept when we remembered Zion."[160] Here is a touch of romance, which is all the more interesting when we consider the great life in which it occurs. [160] Biographie Universelle: Art. _Vincent de Paul_. The kindness of these slave-masters often appears. The English merchant, Abraham Brown, whose sale at Sallee has been already described, confesses, that, after he was carried home, his wounds were tenderly washed and dressed by his master's wife, and, "indeed, the whole family gave him comfortable words." He was furnished with a mat to lie on, "and some three or four days after provided with a shirt, such a one as it was, a pair of shoes, and an old doublet." His servile toils troubled him less than "being commanded by a negro man, who had been a long time in his patron's house a freeman, at whose beck and command he was obliged to be obedient for the doing of the least about the house or mill"; and he concludes his lament on this degradation as follows: "Thus I, who had commanded many men in several parts of the world, must now be commanded by a negro, who, with his two country-women in the house, scorned to drink out of the water-pot I drank of, whereby I was despised of the despised people of the world."[161] Here the free negro played the part so often played by the white overseer in our own country. [161] Memoirs, MS.