But this colored pastor had many sad, heart-breaking trials. This is one of them. Two members of his congregation, a widowed mother and her little daughter, were slaves in the family of a Presbyterian deacon. In the autumn of 1860 the mother came to him, sobbing and wringing her hands, because her master had determined to sell her to a New Orleans slave-trader, and to retain in his own household her little daughter. She must take her chances in the dreaded slave market, and be sold to whom she knew not, a fate from which the slaves of the border States shrank with untold horror, and must be torn from her only child, her greatest earthly solace. But what could her pastor do? He too belonged to the servile race, and in his boyhood had been a slave. Too vehement protestation on his part would damage the case rather than help it. But he fearlessly sought out her master, and pleaded as well as he could the case of the distressed mother. Whatever the deacon may have felt as he listened to the modest, earnest pleading of that great-hearted black pastor, he inflexibly held to his resolution to sell his dark-skinned sister in Christ; not that she had been an unfaithful or inefficient servant, but because the deacon needed money, and as he thought must have it. So he carried out his purpose. The day came when, with a hundred or more consigned to the same pitiless fate, she boarded the steamer at the levee to be carried to her doom. Her little slave daughter was there to give her the last tearful kiss and embrace. Her faithful pastor stood by filled with sorrow and deep down in his soul hot with righteous wrath. The steamer moved out from the levee, the anguished mother and the pastor waved to each other their red bandanas, and slowly the vessel with its freight of sorrow disappeared down the river. Immediately after, I met this pastor with his burden of grief, and he told me the sad tale. He said: “Think of it! she came to me for comfort. And I did the best I could.” I said to him, “I don’t see what you could have said to comfort her.” He replied, “There was not much that I could say; but I did tell her that God was down there as well as up here, and in some way he would take care of her, and that when she got to heaven, where the wicked cease from troubling, she would not find that Presbyterian deacon there to torment her.” He uttered this in dead earnestness, and with a solemn gravity befitting the heart-breaking story, seemingly without the slightest consciousness of the mingled humor and sarcasm of his last declaration.