The oily auctioneer was inviting the people to pinch the wares.  Men came forward to feel the creatures and look into their mouths, and one brute, unshaven and with filthy linen, snatched a child from its mother’s lap Stephen shuddered with the sharpest pain he had ever known.  An ocean-wide tempest arose in his breast, Samson’s strength to break the pillars of the temple to slay these men with his bare hands.  Seven generations of stern life and thought had their focus here in him,—­from Oliver Cromwell to John Brown.

Stephen was far from prepared for the storm that raged within him.  He had not been brought up an Abolitionist—­far from it.  Nor had his father’s friends—­who were deemed at that time the best people in Boston—­been Abolitionists.  Only three years before, when Boston had been aflame over the delivery of the fugitive Anthony Burns, Stephen had gone out of curiosity to the meeting at Faneuil Hall.  How well he remembered his father’s indignation when he confessed it, and in his anger Mr. Brice had called Phillips and Parker “agitators.”  But his father, nor his father’s friends in Boston had never been brought face to face with this hideous traffic.

Hark!  Was that the sing-song voice of the auctioneer He was selling the cattle.  High and low, caressing an menacing, he teased and exhorted them to buy.  The were bidding, yes, for the possession of souls, bidding in the currency of the Great Republic.  And between the eager shouts came a moan of sheer despair.  What was the attendant doing now?  He was tearing two of then:  from a last embrace.

Three—­four were sold while Stephen was in a dream

Then came a lull, a hitch, and the crowd began to chatter gayly.  But the misery in front of him held Stephen in a spell.  Figures stood out from the group.  A white-haired patriarch, with eyes raised to the sky; a flat-breasted woman whose child was gone, whose weakness made her valueless.  Then two girls were pushed forth, one a quadroon of great beauty, to be fingered.  Stephen turned his face away,—­to behold Mr. Eliphalet Hopper looking calmly on.

“Wal, Mr. Brice, this is an interesting show now, ain’t it?  Something we don’t have.  I generally stop here to take a look when I’m passing.”  And he spat tobacco juice on the coping.

Stephen came to his senses.

“And you are from New England?” he said.

Mr. Hopper laughed.

“Tarnation!” said he, “you get used to it.  When I came here, I was a sort of an Abolitionist.  But after you’ve lived here awhile you get to know that niggers ain’t fit for freedom.”

Silence from Stephen.

“Likely gal, that beauty,” Eliphalet continued unrepressed.  “There’s a well-known New Orleans dealer named Jenkins after her.  I callate she’ll go down river.”

“I reckon you’re right, Mistah,” a man with a matted beard chimed in, and added with a wink:  “She’ll find it pleasant enough—­fer a while.  Some of those other niggers will go too, and they’d rather go to hell.  They do treat ’em nefarious down thah on the wholesale plantations.  Household niggers! there ain’t none better off than them.  But seven years in a cotton swamp,—­seven years it takes, that’s all, Mistah.”