the learned and patriotic, are out, this day, to
give their countenance to an edifying, and impressive, and truly
American spectacle--the sale of a man! All the preliminaries of the
scene are there; dusky-browed mothers, looking with sad eyes while
speculators are turning round their children, looking at their teeth,
and feeling of their arms; a poor, old, trembling woman, helpless, half
blind, whose last child is to be sold, holds on to her bright boy with
trembling hands. Husbands and wives, sisters and friends, all soon to be
scattered like the chaff of the threshing floor, look sadly on each
other with poor nature's last tears; and among them walk briskly, glib,
oily politicians, and thriving men of law, letters, and religion,
exceedingly sprightly, and in good spirits--for why?--it isn't _they_
that are going to be sold; it's only somebody else. And so they are very
comfortable, and look on the whole thing as quite a matter-of-course
affair, and, as it is to be conducted to-day, a decidedly valuable and
judicious exhibition.

And now, after so many hearts and souls have been knocked and thumped
this way and that way by the auctioneer's hammer, comes the
_instructive_ part of the whole; and the husband and father, whom we saw
in his simple home, reading and praying with his children, and rejoicing
in the joy of his poor ignorant heart that he lived in a free country,
is now set up to be admonished of his mistake.

Now there is great excitement, and pressing to see, and exultation and
approbation; for it is important and interesting to see a man put down
that has tried to be a _free man_.

"That's he, is it? Couldn't come it, could he?" says one.

"No; and he will never come it, that's more," says another,
triumphantly.

"I don't generally take much interest in scenes of this nature," says a
grave representative; "but I came here to-day for the sake of the
_principle_!"

"Gentlemen," says the auctioneer, "we've got a specimen here that some
of your northern abolitionists would give any price for; but they shan't
have him! no! we've looked out for that. The man that buys him must give
bonds never to sell him to go north again!"

"Go it!" shout the crowd; "good! good! hurrah!" "An impressive idea!"
says a senator; "a noble maintaining of principle!" and the man is bid
off, and the hammer falls with a last crash on his heart, his hopes, his
manhood, and he lies a bleeding wreck on the altar of Liberty!

Such w