tearfully entreated us to buy her, promising over and over again to be faithful and good. In that sad entreaty one could detect the harrowing fear of being sold down South. Her plaint was more than a good pastor from Troy, N. Y., could endure. Coming up close to my side he said, “For God’s sake, Anderson, let us get out of here!” I rapped on the door; Mr. Lynch opened it; we thanked him for his kindness, bade him good day, and marched silently down the street. There was now no joking, no merriment. We turned the corner into another street. We were hidden from Lynch’s gaze. My friend from Troy stopped; in indignation he stamped his foot; he was in agony of spirit; he planted his heel on the brick sidewalk and, turning the toe of his foot hither and thither again and again, he ground the brick under his heel. It was an instinctive bodily movement, an irrepressible outward expression of his intense desire to grind slavery to powder. At last he exclaimed, “Thank God, I never had anything to do with that.” “Don’t be too sure about that,” I replied, “how have you voted? Now,” I added, “let us go to a slave-pen at the corner of Fifth and Myrtle Streets, where they keep little colored boys and girls for sale.” “No,” he vehemently replied, “I will not go a step, I have seen enough. You could not hire me to go there with all the gold in California.” This pen where slave children were kept was much larger than Lynch’s. The traffic in children seemed to be specially brisk and profitable. The inmates of this grim prison-house were from about five to sixteen years old. Both sexes were there. When the slave-trader bought a mother and her children, she was sometimes for a season shut up with her brood in that hated place. Every few weeks there was an auction of these black children, with all of its repulsive, heart-breaking scenes. On one such occasion the auctioneer commended to a crowd a beautiful mulatto girl, about sixteen years old, as having the blood of a United States senator running in her veins. Some in that gaping throng listened with delight; but a gentleman from the East, a mild-mannered man, unexpectedly flamed out with indignation, and denounced the auctioneer and the whole vile slave-trade. For this drastic, burning denunciation he was threatened with violence. But this man of gentle spirit and manners, when aroused, proved to be a veritable “son of thunder,” and he defied his assailants. “When,” he said, “this shameless injustice is not only periodically enacted in our city, but our whole State is plunged into ignominy by offering for sale a daughter of a United States senator, I cannot and will not hold my peace. Do what you please. I denounce the outrage.” Those that threatened him were cowed into silence; the disturbance was only a momentary ripple; the auctioneer went on with his nefarious task; the girl with senatorial blood was knocked down to the highest bidder. And then another, and another, and another, boy or girl, was sold under