“At one of the taverns along the road we were set down in the same room with an elderly man and a youth who seemed to be well acquainted with him, for they conversed familiarly and with true republican independence—­for they did not mind who heard them.  From the tenor of his conversation I was induced to look particularly at the elder.  He was telling the youth something like the following detested tale.  He was going, it seems, to Richmond, to inquire about a draft for seven thousand dollars, which he had sent by mail, but which, not having been acknowledged by his correspondent, he was afraid had been stolen, and the money received by the thief.  ‘I should not like to lose it,’ said he, ’for I worked hard for it, and sold many a poor d——­l of a black to Carolina and Georgia, to scrape it together.’  He then went on to tell many a perfidious tale.  All along the road it seems he made it his business to inquire where lived a man who might be tempted to become a party in this accursed traffic, and when he had got some half dozen of these poor creatures, he tied their hands behind their backs, and drove them three or four hundred miles or more, bare-headed and half naked through the burning southern sun.  Fearful that even southern humanity would revolt at such an exhibition of human misery and human barbarity, he gave out that they were runaway slaves he was carrying home to their masters.  On one occasion a poor black woman exposed this fallacy, and told the story of her being kidnapped, and when he got her into a wood out of hearing, he beat her, to use his own expression, ‘till her back was white.’  It seems he married all the men and women he bought, himself, because they would sell better for being man and wife!  But, said the youth, were you not afraid, in traveling through the wild country and sleeping in lone houses, these slaves would rise and kill you?  ‘To be sure I was,’ said the other, ’but I always fastened my door, put a chair on a table before it, so that it might wake me in falling, and slept with a loaded pistol in each hand.  It was a bad life, and I left it off as soon as I could live without it; for many is the time I have separated wives from husbands, and husbands from wives, and parents from children, but then I made them amends by marrying them again as soon as I had a chance, that is to say, I made them call each other man and wife, and sleep together, which is quite enough for negroes.  I made one bad purchase though,’ continued he.  ’I bought a young mulatto girl, a lively creature, a great bargain.  She had been the favorite of her master, who had lately married.  The difficulty was to get her to go, for the poor creature loved her master.  However, I swore most bitterly I was only going to take to take her to her mother’s at ——­ and she went with me, though she seemed to doubt me very much.  But when she discovered, at last, that we were out of the state, I thought she would go mad, and in fact, the next night she drowned herself in the river close by.  I lost a good five hundred dollars by this foolish trick.’” Vol.  I. p. 121.