arged the duties of her station in
early life, I know not--enjoyed the high privilege of living in a cabin,
separate from the quarter, with no other burden than her own support,
and the necessary care of the little children, imposed. She evidently
esteemed it a great fortune to live so. The children were not her own,
but her grandchildren--the children of her daughters. She took delight
in having them around her, and in attending to their few wants. The
practice of separating children from their mother, and hiring the latter
out at distances too great to admit of their meeting, except at long
intervals, is a marked feature of the cruelty and barbarity of the
slave system. But it is in harmony with the grand aim of slavery, which,
always and everywhere, is to reduce man to a level with the brute. It is
a successful method of obliterating{29 "OLD MASTER"} from the mind and
heart of the slave, all just ideas of the sacredness of _the family_, as
an institution.

Most of the children, however, in this instance, being the children of
my grandmother's daughters, the notions of family, and the reciprocal
duties and benefits of the relation, had a better chance of being
understood than where children are placed--as they often are in the
hands of strangers, who have no care for them, apart from the wishes
of their masters. The daughters of my grandmother were five in number.
Their names were JENNY, ESTHER, MILLY, PRISCILLA, and HARRIET. The
daughter last named was my mother, of whom the reader shall learn more
by-and-by.

Living here, with my dear old grandmother and grandfather, it was a
long time before I knew myself to be _a slave_. I knew many other things
before I knew that. Grandmother and grandfather were the greatest people
in the world to me; and being with them so snugly in their own little
cabin--I supposed it be their own--knowing no higher authority over me
or the other children than the authority of grandmamma, for a time there
was nothing to disturb me; but, as I grew larger and older, I learned
by degrees the sad fact, that the "little hut," and the lot on which it
stood, belonged not to my dear old grandparents, but to some person who
lived a great distance off, and who was called, by grandmother, "OLD
MASTER." I further learned the sadder fact, that not only the house and
lot, but that grandmother herself, (grandfather was free,) and all
the little children around her, belonged to this mysterious personage,
c