r the tearful joy of his mother;{140} nor the
evident saticfaction(sic) of Master Hugh. I was just one month absent
from Baltimore, before the matter was decided; and the time really
seemed full six months.

One trouble over, and on comes another. The slave's life is full of
uncertainty. I had returned to Baltimore but a short time, when the
tidings reached me, that my friend, Mrs. Lucretia, who was only second
in my regard to Mrs. Hugh Auld, was dead, leaving her husband and only
one child--a daughter, named Amanda.

Shortly after the death of Mrs. Lucretia, strange to say, Master Andrew
died, leaving his wife and one child. Thus, the whole family of Anthonys
was swept away; only two children remained. All this happened within
five years of my leaving Col. Lloyd's.

No alteration took place in the condition of the slaves, in consequence
of these deaths, yet I could not help feeling less secure, after the
death of my friend, Mrs. Lucretia, than I had done during her life.
While she lived, I felt that I had a strong friend to plead for me in
any emergency. Ten years ago, while speaking of the state of things in
our family, after the events just named, I used this language:

Now all the property of my old master, slaves included, was in the hands
of strangers--strangers who had nothing to do in accumulating it. Not
a slave was left free. All remained slaves, from youngest to oldest. If
any one thing in my experience, more than another, served to deepen my
conviction of the infernal character of slavery, and to fill me with
unutterable loathing of slaveholders, it was their base ingratitude to
my poor old grandmother. She had served my old master faithfully from
youth to old age. She had been the source of all his wealth; she had
peopled his plantation with slaves; she had become a great-grandmother
in his service. She had rocked him in infancy, attended him in
childhood, served him through life, and at his death wiped from his
icy brow the cold death-sweat, and closed his eyes forever. She was
nevertheless left a slave--a slave for life--a slave in the hands of
strangers; and in their hands she saw her children, her grandchildren,
and her great-grandchildren, divided, like so many sheep, without being
gratified with the small privilege of a single word, as to their or
her own destiny. And, to cap the climax of their base ingratitude
and fiendish barbarity, my grandmother, who was now very old, having
outlived my old m