pride themselves on their chivalry as some of our opulent slave-dealers.  Did we want proof to sustain what we have said we could not do better than refer to Mr. Forsheu, that very excellent gentleman.  Mrs. Swiggs held him in high esteem, and so far regarded his character for piety and chivalry unblemished, that she consigned to him her old slave of seventy years-old Molly.  Molly must be sold, the New York Tract Society must have a mite, and Sister Abijah Slocum’s very laudable enterprise of getting Brother Singleton Spyke off to Antioch must be encouraged.  And Mr. Forsheu is very kind to the old people he sells.  It would, indeed, be difficult for the distant reader to conceive a more striking instance of a man, grown rich in a commerce that blunts all the finer qualities of our nature, preserving a gentleness, excelled only by his real goodness of heart.

When the old slave, leaning on her crutch, stood before Mr. Forsheu, her face the very picture of age and starvation, his heart recoiled at the thought of selling her in her present condition.  He read the letter she bore, contemplated her with an air of pity, and turning to Mr. Benbow, his methodical book-keeper of twenty years, who had added and subtracted through a wilderness of bodies and souls, ordered him to send the shrunken old woman into the pen, on feed.  Mr. Forsheu prided himself on the quality of people sold at his shambles, and would not for the world hazard his reputation on old Molly, till she was got in better condition.  Molly rather liked this, inasmuch as she had been fed on corn and prayers exclusively, and more prayers than corn, which is become the fashion with our much-reduced first families.  For nearly four months she enjoyed, much to the discomfiture of her august owner, the comforts of Mr. Forsheu’s pen.  Daily did the anxious old lady study her Milton, and dispatch a slave to inquire if her piece of aged property had found a purchaser.  The polite vender preserved, with uncommon philosophy, his temper.  He enjoined patience.  The condition and age of the property were, he said, much in the way of sale.  Then Mrs. Swiggs began questioning his ability as a merchant.  Aspersions of this kind, the polite vender of people could not bear with.  He was a man of enormous wealth, the result of his skill in the sale of people.  He was the president of an insurance company, a bank director, a commissioner of the orphan asylum, and a steward of the jockey club.  To his great relief, for he began to have serious misgivings about his outlay on old Molly, there came along one day an excellent customer.  This was no less a person than Madame Flamingo.  What was singular of this very distinguished lady was, that she always had a use for old slaves no one else ever thought of.  Her yard was full of aged and tottering humanity.  One cleaned knives, another fetched ice from the ice-house, a third blacked boots, a fourth split wood, a fifth carried groceries, and a sixth did the marketing.  She had a decayed negro for the smallest service; and, to her credit be it said, they were as contented and well fed a body of tottering age as could be found in old Carolina.