children; and they were of the tribe of slaves fleeing from a bondage which was worse than death.  There was now no escape—­the tribes of Israel had banded against them.  On the side of the oppressor there is power.  And the young wife and mother, into whose very soul the iron had entered, hearing the cry of the master:  “Now we’ll have you all!” turning from the side of her husband and father, with whom she had stood to repel the foe, seized a knife, and with a single blow nearly severed the head from the body of her darling daughter, and throwing its bloody corpse at his feet, exclaimed, “Yes, you shall have us all! take that!” and with another blow inflicted a ghastly wound upon the head of her beautiful son, repeating, “Yes, you shall have us all—­take that!” meanwhile calling upon her old mother to help her in the quick work of emancipation—­for there were two more.  But the pious old grandmother could not do it, and it was now too late—­the rescuers had subdued and bound them.  They were on their way back to the house of their bondage—­a life more bitter than death!  On their way through that city of churches whose hundred spires told of Jesus and the good Father above; on their way amid the throng of Christian men, whose noble sires had said and sung, “Give me liberty, or give me death.”

But they all tarried in the great Queen City of the West—­in chains, and in a felon’s cell.  There our preacher visited them again and again.  There he saw the old grandfather and his aged companion, whose weary pilgrimage of unrequited toil and tears was nearly at its end.  And there stood the young father and the heroic wife “Margaret.”  Said the preacher, “Margaret, why did you kill your child?” “It was my own,” she said, “given me of God, to do the best a mother could in its behalf. I have done the best I could! I would have done more and better for the rest!  I knew it was better for them to go home to God than back to slavery.”  “But why did you not trust in God—­why not wait and hope?” “I did wait, and then we dared to do, and fled in fear, but in hope; hope fled—­God did not appear to save—­I did the best I could!"

And who was this woman?  A noble, womanly, amiable, affectionate mother.  “But was she not deranged?” Not at all—­calm, intelligent, but resolute and determined.  “But was she not fiendish, or beside herself with passion?” No, she was most tender and affectionate, and all her passion was that of a mother’s fondest love.  I reasoned with her, said the preacher; tried to awaken a sense of guilt, and lead her to repentance and to Christ.  But there was no remorse, no desire of pardon, no reception of Christ or his religion.  To her it was a religion of slavery, more cruel than death.  And where had she lived? where thus taught?  Not down among the rice swamps of Georgia, or on the banks of Red River.  No, but within sixteen miles of the Queen City of the West!  In