ildren whom she might have reared! And not a lady
of that kind saw her face but wanted her, yearned for her, pleaded for
her, coming back secretly to slip silver, and sometimes gold, pieces
into her hand, patting her turbaned head, calling her "little Mammy"
too, instantly, by inspiration, and making the negro-trader give them,
with all sorts of assurances, the refusal of her. She had no need for
the whispered "Buy me, master!" "Buy me, mistress!" "You'll see how I
can work, master!" "You'll never be sorry, mistress!" of the others.
The negro-trader--like hangmen, negro-traders are fitted by nature for
their profession--it came into his head--he had no heart, not even a
negro-trader's heart--that it would be more judicious to seclude her
during these shopping visits, so to speak. She could not have had any
hopes then at all; it must have been all desperations.

That auction-block, that executioner's block, about which so much has
been written--Jacob's ladder, in his dream, was nothing to what that
block appeared nightly in her dreams to her; and the climbers up and
down--well, perhaps Jacob's angels were his hopes, too.

At times she determined to depreciate her usefulness, mar her value,
by renouncing her heart, denying her purpose. For days she would
tie her kerchief over her ears and eyes, and crouch in a corner,
strangling her impulses. She even malingered, refused food, became
dumb. And she might have succeeded in making herself salable through
incipient lunacy, if through no other way, had she been able to
maintain her role long enough. But some woman or baby always was
falling into some emergency of pain and illness.

How it might have ended one does not like to think. Fortunately, one
does not need to think.

There came a night. She sat alone in the vast, dark caravansary--alone
for the first time in her life. Empty rags and blankets lay strewn
over the floor, no snoring, no tossing in them more. A sacrificial
sale that day had cleared the counters. Alarm-bells rang in the
streets, but she did not know them for alarm-bells; alarm brooded in
the dim space around her, but she did not even recognize that. Her
protracted tension of heart had made her fear-blind to all but one
peradventure.

Once or twice she forgot herself, and limped over to some heap to
relieve an imaginary struggling babe or moaning sleeper. Morning came.
She had dozed. She looked to see the rag-heaps stir; they lay as still
as corpses. The