the hammer till the fall of the curtain of darkness put temporary end to the shameless work. A man connected with this pen defended the breaking up of families by the sale of slaves. He said that black mothers and children did not much mind being separated; that they had little, if any, real affection for each other; it was very much like separating a cow and her calf. A little while after, at that very slave-pen, I saw the disproof of his words. A man had just bought there, at private sale, a little boy about ten years old. The lad’s mother was with him. As he was taken away from the pen, he began in his grief to howl as though his heart was breaking. After he had been taken about two squares, his purchaser, annoyed by the wailing, returned with him to the pen, secured the loan of his mother till he could get his tearful chattel to his home, without attracting a curious and sympathetic crowd on the street. Once there his little slave could be quieted by a sugar plum or a whip. When the lad was at last under the roof of his new master, the bereft and sobbing mother was led back to the desolate pen to be sold to some other master in the city or State, or to some trader who would take her down to the rice or cotton plantations of the South. But when the war came on, there was no longer any demand for slaves. The traffic in human beings suddenly ceased. Lynch shut up his pen. The military authorities seized the pen at the corner of Fifth and Myrtle Streets and transformed it into a military prison. No little colored boy or girl was ever again to be sold there. The place hallowed by the sighs and tears of bondmen and of motherless children was for a time to become the prison-house of those who had bought and sold their fellow men, and were now waging unholy war against the very government that had protected them and their slaves,—the government that had complacently caught and returned to them their chattels who had attempted by flight to cast off their bondage and secure freedom for themselves and their children amid the frosts and snows of Canada. One morning in 1862, an old negro, who for many years had been a drayman for a mercantile firm on Second Street, was full of merriment. He was overheard mumbling something to himself and every now and then breaking out into a laugh. His employer said, “Joe, what is it? What’s the matter?” He responded with a chuckle, “Strange tings happen des days!” “So, what things?” “You kno’s dat slave-pen, corner Fifth an Myrtle?” “Yes.” “Well, de col’ed folks used to carry in tings dar fo der chillen to eat. Dis mawnin, boss, I seed white folks carrying in tings for der folks to eat. Ha! ha! strange tings happen des days.” Sure enough, the tables were turned. Wrongs were being righted. Justice, poetical justice, was being meted out. “With what measure ye mete it shall be measured to you again,” saith the Lord.