e, is it the part of a friend or an enemy to desire to
have it effected?

But all such suppositions as these, the southern man will perhaps say,
are visionary and utopian in the highest degree. No such state of
things as is contemplated by them, can by any possibility be realized
with such a population as the southern slaves. Very well; say _this_,
if you please, and prove it, if it can be proved. But do not charge
those who desire that it might be realized, with being actuated, in
advocating the change, by unfriendly feelings towards you,--for most
assuredly they do not entertain any.

[Illustration: (signature) Jacob Abbott.]

Christine.

"O, these childen, how they do lie round our hearts."--MILLY
EDMONDSON.

The clock struck the appointed hour, and the sale commenced. Articles
of household furniture, horses, carts, and slaves, were waiting
together to be sold to the highest bidder. For strange as it would
seem in another land than this, beneath the ample folds of the
"Star-spangled Banner," _human sinews_ were to be bought and sold.
Bodies, such as the Apostle called the "temples of the Holy Ghost," in
which dwelt souls for which Christ died;--men, women and little
children, made in the image of God, were classed with marketable
commodities, to be sold by the pound, like dumb beasts in the
shambles. Husbands would be torn from their wives, mothers from their
children, and _all_ from everything they loved most dearly.

The group of _human chattels_ excited great interest among the
lookers-on, for they were a choice lot of prime negroes, and rumor
said that he would get a rare bargain who bought that day.

It was a saddening sight, that dusky group, whose only crime was being

"---- guilty of a skin
Not colored like our own,"

as they waited with anxious looks and quivering hearts to hear their
doom, filling up the dreary moments with thoughts of the chances and
changes which overhung their future.

A bright-eyed boy, of twelve years old,

"A brave, free-hearted, careless one,"

with a proud spirit playing in every line of his handsome face, and in
every movement of his graceful form, was first called to the
auction-block. His good qualities were rapidly enumerated, his limbs
rudely examined, his soundness vouched for, and he became the chattel
personal of a Georgian, who boasted of his good bargain; and on being
warned that he would have trouble with the boy, declar