sold until bills were settled and papers made out, led me from the block outside the crowd, and placing me by a cart, put on a pair of iron handcuffs; but being well acquainted with me as a troublesome tricky negro, he put the handcuff on my right wrist—­took the other cuff through the cart wheel and round the spoke, and then locked it on my left hand, so that if I did start to run, I should carry the cart and all with me.  Number twenty-one was now called, and out came poor Reuben, and was placed under the hammer; his weight was said to be two hundred pounds, his age thirty two.  Poor Sally, his wife, unable any longer to control her feelings, made her way out of the slave pen, with her babe in her arms, followed by her five small children, and she threw one of her arms around Reuben’s neck; and now commenced a scene that beggars all description.  Her countenance, though mild and beautiful, was by the keenest pain and sorrow distorted and disfigured:  her voice soft and gentle, accompanied with heart rending gestures, appealed to the slave buyer in tones so very mournful, that I thought it might have even melted cruelty itself to some pity—­coming as it did from a woman:—­Oh! master, master! buy me and my children with my husband—­do, pray; and this was the only crime the poor woman committed for which she suffered death on the spot.  Her master stepped up from behind her, and with the butt end of his carriage whip loaded with lead, struck her a blow on the side of the head or temples, and she fell her full length to the ground.  Poor Reuben stooped to raise her up, but was prevented by the jail policeman, who seized him by the neck and led him over close to where I stood:  and whilst he was in the act of selecting a pair of handcuffs for Reuben, voice after voice was heard in the crowd—­she is dead! she is dead!  But what was the effect of these words upon Reuben—­one of the most easy, good-tempered, innocent, inoffensive, and, in his way, religious slaves that I ever knew—­satisfied apparently that Sally’s death was a fact—­he tore himself loose from the policeman and made his way through the crowd to where poor Sally lay, and exclaimed, Oh!  Sally!  O Lord!  By this time the policeman, who had followed him, undertook to drag him back out of the crowd, but Reuben, with one blow of his fist, stretched the policeman on the ground.  Reuben’s pain and sorrow, mingled with his religious hope, seemed now to terminate in despair, and transformed the inoffensive man into a raging demon.  He rushed to a cart which supported a great number of spectators, just opposite the auction block, and tore out a heavy cart stave, made of red oak, and before the panic-stricken crowd could arrest his arm, he struck his master to the ground, and beat his brains literally out.  The crowd then tried to close upon him, but Reuben, mounted with both feet upon the dead body of his master, and with his back against the cart wheel—­with the cart stave kept the whole crowd at bay for the space of two or