you a prodigy of learning because you can read the Bible, and she has not the faintest idea how such skill can be acquired.  She gives you her whole heart, full of the blind confidence of a first love.  The divine spark, which kindles aspirations for freedom in the human soul, has been glowing more and more brightly since you have emerged from boyhood, and now her glances kindle it into a flame.  For her dear sake, you long to be a free man, with power to protect her from the degrading incidents of a slave-girl’s life.  Wages acquire new value in your eyes, from a wish to supply her with comforts, and enhance her beauty by becoming dress.  For her sake, you are ambitious to acquire skill in the carpenter’s trade, to which your, master-brother has applied you as the best investment of his human capital.  It is true, he takes all your wages; but then, by acquiring uncommon facility, you hope to accomplish your daily tasks in shorter time, and thus obtain some extra hours to do jobs for yourself.  These you can eke out by working late into the night, and rising when the day dawns.  Thus you calculate to be able in time to buy the use of your own limbs.  Poor fellow!  Your intelligence and industry prove a misfortune.  They charge twice as much for the machine of your body on account of the soul-power which moves it.  Your master-brother tells you that you would bring eighteen hundred dollars in the market.  It is a large sum.  Almost hopeless seems the prospect of earning it, at such odd hours as you can catch when the hard day’s task is done.  But you look at Amy, and are inspired with faith to remove mountains.  Your master-brother graciously consents to receive payment by instalments.  These prove a convenient addition to the whole of your wages.  They will enable him to buy a new race horse, and increase his stock of choice wines.  While he sleeps off drunkenness, you are toiling for him, with the blessed prospect of freedom far ahead, but burning brightly in the distance, like a Drummond Light, guiding the watchful mariner over a midnight sea.

When you have paid five hundred dollars of the required sum, your lonely heart so longs for the comforts of a home, that you can wait no longer.  You marry Amy, with the resolution of buying her also, and removing to those Free States, about which you have often talked together, as invalids discourse of heaven.  Amy is a member of the church, and it is a great point with her to be married by a minister.  Her master and mistress make no objection, knowing that after the ceremony, she will remain an article of property, the same as ever.  Now come happy months, during which you almost forget that you are a slave, and that it must be a weary long while before you can earn enough to buy yourself and your dear one, in addition to supporting your dissipated master.  But you toil bravely on, and soon pay another hundred dollars toward your ransom.  The Drummond Light of Freedom burns brighter in the diminished distance.