To add to this combination of misfortunes, on his return to the plantation he found it deserted,--a sheriff's keeper guarding his personal effects, his few remaining negroes seized upon and marched into the city for the satisfaction of his debts. Clotilda has been seized upon, manacled, driven to the city, committed to prison. Another creditor has found out the hiding-place of the children; directs the sheriff, who seizes upon them, like property of their kind, and drags them to prison. Oh, that prison walls were made for torturing the innocent! Marston is left poor upon the world; Ellen Juvarna is in the hands of a resurrectionist; Nicholas-a bright boy he has grown-is within the dark confines of a prison cell, along with Clotilda and Annette. Melancholy broods over the plantation now. The act of justice,--the right which Marston saw through wrong, and which he had intended to carry out,--is now beyond his power. Stripped of those comforts he had enjoyed, his offspring carried off as trophies of avarice,--perhaps for sale to some ruffian who would set a price upon their beauty,--he sits down, sick at heart, and weeps a child's tears. The mansion, so long the scene of pleasure and hospitality, is like a deserted barrack;-still, gloomy, cold, in the absence of familiar faces. No servant comes to call him master,--Dandy and Enoch are gone; and those familiar words, so significant of affection between master and slave, "Glad to see ye home, mas'r," no longer sounded in his ears. Even his overseer has become alarmed, and like the rest levied for arrears of wages.