Susan remembered the man's looks and words. With a deadly sickness at
her heart, she remembered how he had looked at Emmeline's hands, and
lifted up her curly hair, and pronounced her a first-rate article. Susan
had been trained as a Christian, brought up in the daily reading of the
Bible, and had the same horror of her child's being sold to a life
of shame that any other Christian mother might have; but she had no
hope,--no protection.

"Mother, I think we might do first rate, if you could get a place as
cook, and I as chambermaid or seamstress, in some family. I dare say we
shall. Let's both look as bright and lively as we can, and tell all we
can do, and perhaps we shall," said Emmeline.

"I want you to brush your hair all back straight, tomorrow," said Susan.

"What for, mother? I don't look near so well, that way."

"Yes, but you'll sell better so."

"I don't see why!" said the child.

"Respectable families would be more apt to buy you, if they saw you
looked plain and decent, as if you wasn't trying to look handsome. I
know their ways better 'n you do," said Susan.

"Well, mother, then I will."

"And, Emmeline, if we shouldn't ever see each other again, after
tomorrow,--if I'm sold way up on a plantation somewhere, and you
somewhere else,--always remember how you've been brought up, and all
Missis has told you; take your Bible with you, and your hymn-book; and
if you're faithful to the Lord, he'll be faithful to you."

So speaks the poor soul, in sore discouragement; for she knows
that tomorrow any man, however vile and brutal, however godless and
merciless, if he only has money to pay for her, may become owner of her
daughter, body and soul; and then, how is the child to be faithful? She
thinks of all this, as she holds her daughter in her arms, and
wishes that she were not handsome and attractive. It seems almost an
aggravation to her to remember how purely and piously, how much above
the ordinary lot, she has been brought up. But she has no resort but to
_pray_; and many such prayers to God have gone up from those same trim,
neatly-arranged, respectable slave-prisons,--prayers which God has not
forgotten, as a coming day shall show; for it is written, "Who causeth
one of these little ones to offend, it were better for him that a
millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the
depths of the sea."

The soft, earnest, quiet moonbeam looks in fixedly, marking the bars
of the grated