e 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 pushed forth, one a quadroon of great
beauty, to be fingered. Stephen turned his face away,--to behold Mr.
Eliphalet Hopper