essional story-tellers. These story-tellers were paid by
the oligarchy, and the tales they told were legendary,
mythical, romantic, and harmless. But the spirit of freedom
never quite died out, and agitators, under the guise of
story-tellers, preached revolt to the slave class. That the
following tale was banned by the oligarchs we have proof
from the records of the criminal police court of Ashbury,
wherein, on January 27, 2734, one John Tourney, found guilty
of telling the tale in a boozing-ken of labourers, was
sentenced to five years' penal servitude in the borax mines
of the Arizona Desert.--EDITOR'S NOTE.]

Listen, my brothers, and I will tell you a tale of an arm. It was the
arm of Tom Dixon, and Tom Dixon was a weaver of the first class in a
factory of that hell-hound and master, Roger Vanderwater. This factory
was called "Hell's Bottom"... by the slaves who toiled in it, and I
guess they ought to know; and it was situated in Kingsbury, at the other
end of the town from Vanderwater's summer palace. You do not know where
Kingsbury is? There are many things, my brothers, that you do not know,
and it is sad. It is because you do not know that you are slaves. When I
have told you this tale, I should like to form a class among you for the
learning of written and printed speech. Our masters read and write and
possess many books, and it is because of that that they are our masters,
and live in palaces, and do not work. When the toilers learn to read
and write--all of them--they will grow strong; then they will use their
strength to break their bonds, and there will be no more masters and no
more slaves.

Kingsbury, my brothers, is in the old State of Alabama. For three
hundred years the Vanderwaters have owned Kingsbury and its slave pens
and factories, and slave pens and factories in many other places and
States. You have heard of the Vanderwaters--who has not?--but let me
tell you things you do not know about them. The first Vanderwater was
a slave, even as you and I. Have you got that? He was a slave, and that
was over three hundred years ago. His father was a machinist in the
slave pen of Alexander Burrell, and his mother was a washerwoman in the
same slave pen. There is no doubt about this. I am telling you truth. It
is history. It is printed, every word of it, in the history books of our
masters, which you cannot read because your masters will not permit you
to