“Well, Mas’r,” said Tom, “towards morning something brushed by me, and I kinder half woke; and then I hearn a great splash, and then I clare woke up, and the gal was gone.  That’s all I know on ’t.”

The trader was not shocked nor amazed; because, as we said before, he was used to a great many things that you are not used to.  Even the awful presence of Death struck no solemn chill upon him.  He had seen Death many times,—­met him in the way of trade, and got acquainted with him,—­and he only thought of him as a hard customer, that embarrassed his property operations very unfairly; and so he only swore that the gal was a baggage, and that he was devilish unlucky, and that, if things went on in this way, he should not make a cent on the trip.  In short, he seemed to consider himself an ill-used man, decidedly; but there was no help for it, as the woman had escaped into a state which never will give up a fugitive,—­not even at the demand of the whole glorious Union.  The trader, therefore, sat discontentedly down, with his little account-book, and put down the missing body and soul under the head of losses!

“He’s a shocking creature, isn’t he,—­this trader? so unfeeling!  It’s dreadful, really!”

“O, but nobody thinks anything of these traders!  They are universally despised,—­never received into any decent society.”

But who, sir, makes the trader?  Who is most to blame?  The enlightened, cultivated, intelligent man, who supports the system of which the trader is the inevitable result, or the poor trader himself?  You make the public statement that calls for his trade, that debauches and depraves him, till he feels no shame in it; and in what are you better than he?

Are you educated and he ignorant, you high and he low, you refined and he coarse, you talented and he simple?

In the day of a future judgment, these very considerations may make it more tolerable for him than for you.

In concluding these little incidents of lawful trade, we must beg the world not to think that American legislators are entirely destitute of humanity, as might, perhaps, be unfairly inferred from the great efforts made in our national body to protect and perpetuate this species of traffic.

Who does not know how our great men are outdoing themselves, in declaiming against the foreign slave-trade.  There are a perfect host of Clarksons and Wilberforces* risen up among us on that subject, most edifying to hear and behold.  Trading negroes from Africa, dear reader, is so horrid!  It is not to be thought of!  But trading them from Kentucky,—­that’s quite another thing!

* Thomas Clarkson (1760-1846) and William Wilberforce (1759- 1833), English philanthropists and anti-slavery agitators who helped to secure passage of the Emancipation Bill by Parliament in 1833.

CHAPTER XIII