e
admiration flatters your vanity. She considers you a prodigy of
learning because you can read the Bible, and she has not the
faintest idea how such skill can be acquired. She gives you her
whole heart, full of the blind confidence of a first love. The
divine spark, which kindles aspirations for freedom in the human
soul, has been glowing more and more brightly since you have emerged
from boyhood, and now her glances kindle it into a flame. For her
dear sake, you long to be a free man, with power to protect her from
the degrading incidents of a slave-girl's life. Wages acquire new
value in your eyes, from a wish to supply her with comforts, and
enhance her beauty by becoming dress. For her sake, you are
ambitious to acquire skill in the carpenter's trade, to which your,
master-brother has applied you as the best investment of his human
capital. It is true, he takes all your wages; but then, by acquiring
uncommon facility, you hope to accomplish your daily tasks in
shorter time, and thus obtain some extra hours to do jobs for
yourself. These you can eke out by working late into the night, and
rising when the day dawns. Thus you calculate to be able in time to
buy the use of your own limbs. Poor fellow! Your intelligence and
industry prove a misfortune. They charge twice as much for the
machine of your body on account of the soul-power which moves it.
Your master-brother tells you that you would bring eighteen hundred
dollars in the market. It is a large sum. Almost hopeless seems the
prospect of earning it, at such odd hours as you can catch when the
hard day's task is done. But you look at Amy, and are inspired with
faith to remove mountains. Your master-brother graciously consents
to receive payment by instalments. These prove a convenient addition
to the whole of your wages. They will enable him to buy a new race
horse, and increase his stock of choice wines. While he sleeps off
drunkenness, you are toiling for him, with the blessed prospect of
freedom far ahead, but burning brightly in the distance, like a
Drummond Light, guiding the watchful mariner over a midnight sea.

When you have paid five hundred dollars of the required sum, your
lonely heart so longs for the comforts of a home, that you can wait
no longer. You marry Amy, with the resolution of buying her also,
and removing to those Free States, about which you have often talked
together, as invalids discourse of heaven. Amy is a member of the
church, and i