aster and all his children, having seen the beginning
and end of all of them, and her present owners finding she{141} was of
but little value, her frame already racked with the pains of old age,
and complete helplessness fast stealing over her once active limbs,
they took her to the woods, built her a little hut, put up a little
mud-chimney, and then made her welcome to the privilege of supporting
herself there in perfect loneliness; thus virtually turning her out to
die! If my poor old grandmother now lives, she lives to suffer in utter
loneliness; she lives to remember and mourn over the loss of children,
the loss of grandchildren, and the loss of great-grandchildren. They
are, in the language of the slave's poet, Whittier--

_Gone, gone, sold and gone,
To the rice swamp dank and lone,
Where the slave-whip ceaseless swings,
Where the noisome insect stings,
Where the fever-demon strews
Poison with the falling dews,
Where the sickly sunbeams glare
Through the hot and misty air:--
Gone, gone, sold and gone
To the rice swamp dank and lone,
From Virginia hills and waters--
Woe is me, my stolen daughters_!

The hearth is desolate. The children, the unconscious children, who once
sang and danced in her presence, are gone. She gropes her way, in the
darkness of age, for a drink of water. Instead of the voices of her
children, she hears by day the moans of the dove, and by night the
screams of the hideous owl. All is gloom. The grave is at the door. And
now, when weighed down by the pains and aches of old age, when the head
inclines to the feet, when the beginning and ending of human existence
meet, and helpless infancy and painful old age combine together--at
this time, this most needful time, the time for the exercise of that
tenderness and affection which children only can exercise toward a
declining parent--my poor old grandmother, the devoted mother of twelve
children, is left all alone, in yonder little hut, before a few dim
embers.

Two years after the death of Mrs. Lucretia, Master Thomas married his
second wife. Her name was Rowena Hamilton, the eldest daughter of Mr.
William Hamilton, a rich slaveholder on the Eastern Shore of Maryland,
who lived about five miles from St. Michael's, the the