t requireth you to prove ye are not."

I said:

"Dear sir, give us only time to send to Astolat; or give us only
time to send to the Valley of Holiness--"

"Peace, good man, these are extraordinary requests, and you may
not hope to have them granted. It would cost much time, and would
unwarrantably inconvenience your master--"

"_Master_, idiot!" stormed the king. "I have no master, I myself
am the m--"

"Silence, for God's sake!"

I got the words out in time to stop the king. We were in trouble
enough already; it could not help us any to give these people
the notion that we were lunatics.

There is no use in stringing out the details. The earl put us up
and sold us at auction. This same infernal law had existed in
our own South in my own time, more than thirteen hundred years
later, and under it hundreds of freemen who could not prove that
they were freemen had been sold into lifelong slavery without
the circumstance making any particular impression upon me; but the
minute law and the auction block came into my personal experience,
a thing which had been merely improper before became suddenly
hellish. Well, that's the way we are made.

Yes, we were sold at auction, like swine. In a big town and an
active market we should have brought a good price; but this place
was utterly stagnant and so we sold at a figure which makes me
ashamed, every time I think of it. The King of England brought
seven dollars, and his prime minister nine; whereas the king was
easily worth twelve dollars and I as easily worth fifteen. But
that is the way things always go; if you force a sale on a dull
market, I don't care what the property is, you are going to make
a poor business of it, and you can make up your mind to it. If
the earl had had wit enough to--

However, there is no occasion for my working my sympathies up
on his account. Let him go, for the present; I took his number,
so to speak.

The slave-dealer bought us both, and hitched us onto that long
chain of his, and we constituted the rear of his procession. We
took up our line of march and passed out of Cambenet at noon;
and it seemed to me unaccountably strange and odd that the King
of England and his chief minister, marching manacled and fettered
and yoked, in a slave convoy, could move by all manner of idle men
and women, and under windows where sat the sweet and the lovely,
and yet never attract a curious eye, never provoke a single remark.
Dear, dear,