head of cattle.  While the sale was going on, the mother and her children were exhibited on a table, that they might be seen by the company, which was very large.  There could not have been a finer subject for an able painter than this unhappy group.  The tears, the anxiety, the anguish of the mother, while she met the gaze of the multitude, eyed the different countenances of the bidders, or cast a heart-rending look upon the children; and the simplicity and touching sorrow of the young ones, while they clung to their distracted parent, wiping their eyes, and half concealing their faces,—­contrasted with the marked insensibility and jocular countenances of the spectators and purchasers,—­furnished a striking commentary on the miseries of slavery, and its debasing effects upon the hearts of its abettors.  While the woman was in this distressed situation she was asked, ‘Can you feed sheep?’ Her reply was so indistinct that it escaped me; but it was probably in the negative, for her purchaser rejoined, in a loud and harsh voice, ’Then I will teach you with the sjamboc,’ (a whip made of the rhinoceros’ hide.) The mother and her three children were sold to three separate purchasers; and they were literally torn from each other.”—­Ed.]

My new master was a Captain I——­, who lived at Spanish Point.  After parting with my mother and sisters, I followed him to his store, and he gave me into the charge of his son, a lad about my own age, Master Benjy, who took me to my new home.  I did not know where I was going, or what my new master would do with me.  My heart was quite broken with grief, and my thoughts went back continually to those from whom I had been so suddenly parted.  “Oh, my mother! my mother!” I kept saying to myself, “Oh, my mammy and my sisters and my brothers, shall I never see you again!”

Oh, the trials! the trials! they make the salt water come into my eyes when I think of the days in which I was afflicted—­the times that are gone; when I mourned and grieved with a young heart for those whom I loved.

It was night when I reached my new home.  The house was large, and built at the bottom of a very high hill; but I could not see much of it that night.  I saw too much of it afterwards.  The stones and the timber were the best things in it; they were not so hard as the hearts of the owners.[3]

[Footnote 3:  These strong expressions, and all of a similar character in this little narrative, are given verbatim as uttered by Mary Prince.—­Ed.]

Before I entered the house, two slave women, hired from another owner, who were at work in the yard, spoke to me, and asked who I belonged to?  I replied, “I am come to live here.”  “Poor child, poor child!” they both said; “you must keep a good heart, if you are to live here.”—­When I went in, I stood up crying in a corner.  Mrs. I——­ came and took off my hat, a little black silk hat Miss Pruden made for me, and said in a rough voice, “You are not come here