This bedizzoned martyr, this costumer’s advertisement, sat and fanned as she recounted her grievances.  Her entire allowance for personal expenses, was the wages of nine women, and her husband would not give her another dollar.  They, knowing her necessities, were so ungrateful!—­nobody could think how ungrateful; but in all her sorrows, Martha was her crowning grief.  She had had two husbands, and had behaved so badly when the first was sold.  Then, every time one of her thirteen children were disposed of, she “did take on so;” nobody could imagine “how she took on!”

Once, the gentle mistress had been compelled to send her to the workhouse and have her whipped by the constable; and that cost fifty cents; but really, this martyr and her husband had grown weary of flogging Martha.  One hated so to send a servant to the public whipping-post; it looked like cruelty—­did cruelty lacerate the feelings of refined people, and it was so ungrateful in Martha, and all the rest of them, to torture this fine lady in this rough way.

As to Martha’s ingratitude, there could be no doubt; for, to this, our hostess testified, and called me to witness, that she had sent her a cup of tea every day since she had complained of being sick; yes, “a cup of tea with sugar in it,” and yet the old wretch had not gone to work.

When they had finished the recital of their grievances they came down to business.  The owner would remit two week’s wages; after that it was the business of the employer to pay them, and see that they were earned.  If it were necessary now to send Martha to the whipping-post, the lady in satin would pay the fifty cents; but for any future flogging, the lady in lawn must be responsible to the City of Louisville.

We adjourned to the kitchen where old Martha stood before her judge, clutching the table with her hard hands, trembling in every limb, her eyelids swollen out like puff-balls, and offensive from neglect, her white curls making a border to her red turban, receiving her sentence without a word.  As a sheep before her shearers she was dumb, opening not her mouth.  Those wrinkled, old lips, from which I had heard few sounds, save those of prayer and praise, were closed by a cruelty perfectly incomprehensible in its unconscious debasement.  Our hostess was a leading member of the Fourth St. M.E.  Church, the other feminine fiend a Presbyterian.

I promised the Lord then and there, that for life, it should be my work to bring “deliverance to the captive, and the opening of the prison to them that are bound,” but all I could do for Martha, was to give her such medical treatment as would restore her sight and save her from the whipping-post, and this I did.

While I lived on that dark and bloody ground, a man was beaten to death in an open shed, on the corner of two public streets, where the sound of the blows, the curses of his two tormentors, and his shrieks and unavailing prayers for mercy were continued a whole forenoon, and sent the complaining air shuddering to the ears of thousands, not one of whom offered any help.