thy; impudently asking us, "how we would like to have them for
masters?" To such questions, we were, very much to their annoyance,
quite dumb, disdaining to answer them. For one, I detested the
whisky-bloated gamblers in human flesh; and I believe I was as much
detested by them in turn. One fellow told me, "if he had me, he would
cut the devil out of me pretty quick."

These Negro buyers are very offensive to the genteel southern Christian
public. They are looked upon, in respectable Maryland society, as
necessary, but detestable characters. As a class, they{231} are hardened
ruffians, made such by nature and by occupation. Their ears are made
quite familiar with the agonizing cry of outraged and woe-smitted
humanity. Their eyes are forever open to human misery. They walk amid
desecrated affections, insulted virtue, and blasted hopes. They
have grown intimate with vice and blood; they gloat over the wildest
illustrations of their soul-damning and earth-polluting business, and
are moral pests. Yes; they are a legitimate fruit of slavery; and it is
a puzzle to make out a case of greater villainy for them, than for the
slaveholders, who make such a class _possible_. They are mere hucksters
of the surplus slave produce of Maryland and Virginia coarse, cruel, and
swaggering bullies, whose very breathing is of blasphemy and blood.

Aside from these slave-buyers, who infested the prison, from time to
time, our quarters were much more comfortable than we had any right to
expect they would be. Our allowance of food was small and coarse, but
our room was the best in the jail--neat and spacious, and with nothing
about it necessarily reminding us of being in prison, but its heavy
locks and bolts and the black, iron lattice-work at the windows. We
were prisoners of state, compared with most slaves who are put into that
Easton jail. But the place was not one of contentment. Bolts, bars and
grated windows are not acceptable to freedom-loving people of any color.
The suspense, too, was painful. Every step on the stairway was listened
to, in the hope that the comer would cast a ray of light on our fate. We
would have given the hair off our heads for half a dozen words with one
of the waiters in Sol. Lowe's hotel. Such waiters were in the way of
hearing, at the table, the probable course of things. We could see them
flitting about in their white jackets in front of this hotel, but could
speak to none of them.

Soon after the holidays w