young, husband and wife,--the moment was come for all and each. How
hard the stones and what more pitiless than the gaze of their
fellow-creatures in the crowd below! O friends, we who live in peace and
plenty amongst our families, how little do we realize the terror and
the misery and the dumb heart-aches of those days! Stephen thought with
agony of seeing his own mother sold before his eyes, and the building in
front of him was lifted from its foundation and rocked even as shall the
temples on the judgment day.

The oily auctioneer was inviting the people to pinch the wares. Men came
forward to feel the creatures and look into their mouths, and one brute,
unshaven and with filthy linen, snatched a child from its mother's
lap Stephen shuddered with the sharpest pain he had ever known. An
ocean-wide tempest arose in his breast, Samson's strength to break
the pillars of the temple to slay these men with his bare hands. Seven
generations of stern life and thought had their focus here in him,--from
Oliver Cromwell to John Brown.

Stephen was far from prepared for the storm that raged within him.
He had not been brought up an Abolitionist--far from it. Nor had his
father's friends--who were deemed at that time the best people in
Boston--been Abolitionists. Only three years before, when Boston had
been aflame over the delivery of the fugitive Anthony Burns, Stephen
had gone out of curiosity to the meeting at Faneuil Hall. How well he
remembered his father's indignation when he confessed it, and in his
anger Mr. Brice had called Phillips and Parker "agitators." But his
father, nor his father's friends in Boston had never been brought face
to face with this hideous traffic.

Hark! Was that the sing-song voice of the auctioneer He was selling the
cattle. High and low, caressing an menacing, he teased and exhorted them
to buy. The were bidding, yes, for the possession of souls, bidding in
the currency of the Great Republic. And between the eager shouts came a
moan of sheer despair. What was the attendant doing now? He was tearing
two of then: from a last embrace.

Three--four were sold while Stephen was in a dream

Then came a lull, a hitch, and the crowd began to chatter gayly. But the
misery in front of him held Stephen in a spell. Figures stood out from
the group. A white-haired patriarch, with eyes raised to the sky;
a flat-breasted woman whose child was gone, whose weakness made her
valueless. Then two girls were push