should be a creature, a thing, a slave!  He must know no ambition but indolence, no bliss but ignorance, no rest but sleep, no hope but death!  Long leagues must interpose between himself and his home; he should never kiss his mother again, or kneel with his father in the holiness of prayer.  The recollections of his childhood would be crushed out by agonizing experiences of bondage; he would forget his name and the face of his friends, and at last preserve only the horrible consciousness that he was the chattel of his master!

The uproar continued far into the night; one poor creature was delivered of a child in the hazy light of the morning.  Paul was too young to think much of the matter, for his own sorrows engrossed him; but he often recurred, in his subsequent career, to the romance of that bondwoman, and the soul which first felt the breath of life in the precincts of the slave shamble.  What a childhood must it have had to look back upon—­cradled in disgrace, sung to sleep with the simple melodies of grief, bred for no high purposes, but with the one distinct and dreadful idea of gain—­to be filched from that dusky bosom when its little limbs had first essayed motion, that its feeble lips might lisp the accents of servility.  Days and weeks passed over Paul, but he found no opportunity to tell his story.  They kept him purposely that he might forget it, or feel the hopelessness of relating it.  Other wretches came and went, till there remained none of the original inmates of his prison, and he learned to mingle with his coarse companions, joining sometimes in their gayety, and the high walls stood forever between his dreams and the sky till the sombre shadows were printed upon his heart.

The boy’s turn came at length.  He climbed the auction block before the gaping multitude, and leaped to show his suppleness.  They were pleased with his still serious manner, the paleness of his skin, his thoughtful eyes, and the shining ringlets of his hair.  Bids were bandied briskly upon him, and the auctioneer rattled glibly of the rare lot to be sold.

“Who owns the boy?” cried a bystander.

“Colonel James Purnell, of the Eastern shore,” answered the auctioneer.  “His mother is a likely piece that will be in the market presently.”

Tears came to Paul’s eyes, but he held down the great sob that started to his throat, and called lustily:  “It is a wicked story!  My father is white, and my mother is white!  I am not a slave, and they have stolen me!”

A loud, long laugh broke from the crowd, and the trader cracked a merry joke, which helped the pleasantry.

“We may call that a ‘white lie,’” he said; “but it is a peart lad, and the air with which he told it is worth a cool hundred!  Going at four hundred dollars—­four hundred,” etc.

The bidding recommenced.  The article rose in esteem, and Paul was pushed from the block into the arms of a tall, angular person, who led him into the city.  That afternoon he was placed in a railway carriage, and on the third night he was quartered in Mobile, at the dwelling of his purchaser.  The tall person proved to be the agent of a rich old lady—­a childless widow—­who required a handsome, active lad, to wait upon her person, and make a good appearance in the drawing-room.