NEGRO LIFE IN AMERICA. 103

not look particularly cheerful. They had their various little
prejudices in favour of wives, mothers, sisters, and children, seen
for the last time ; and though “they that wasted them required
of them mirth,” it was not instantly forthcoming. i

“I've got a wife, spoke the article enumerated as “John, aged
thirty,” and he laid his chained hand on Tom’s knee, “and she
don’t know a word about this, poor girl!”

‘* Where does she live?” said Tom.

“In a tavern a piece down here,” said John; “I wish, now,
I could see her once more in this world,” he added.

Poor John! It was rather natural; and the tears that fell as
he spoke, came as naturally as if he had been a white man. Tom
drew a long breath from a sore heart, and tried, in his poor way,
to comfort him.

And overhead, in the cabin, sat fathers and mothers, husbands
and wives; and merry, dancing children moved round among
them, like so many little butterflies, and everything was going on
quite easy and comfortable.

“© mamma,” said a boy, who had just come up from below,
“there's a negro trader on board, and he’s brought four or five
slaves down there.”

“ Poor creatures !’’ said the mother, in a tone between grief
and indignation.

‘What's that?” said another lady.

«Some poor slaves below,” said the mother.

“ And they've got chains on,” said the boy.

‘What a shame to our country that such sights are to be
seen!” said another lady.

‘Oh, there’s a great deal to be said on both sides of the sub-
ject,” said a genteel woman, who sat at her state room door, sew-
ing, while her little girl and boy were playing round her. “ I've
been south, and I must say I think the negroes are better off
than they would be to be free.”

“In some respects, some of them are well off, 1 grant,” said
the lady to whose remark she had answered. ‘The most dread-
ful part of slavery, to my mind, is its outrages on the feelings
and affections—the separating of families, for example.”

“That is a bad thing, certainly,” said the other lady, holding
up a baby’s dress she had just completed, and looking intently
on its trimmings; “ but then, I fancy, it don’t occur often.”

“Oh! it does,” said the first lady eagerly; ‘I’ve lived many
years in Kentucky and Virginia both, and I’ve seen enough to
make one’s heart sick. —e. ma’am, your two children there
should be taken from you and sold ?”

“We can’t reason from our feelings to those of this class
of persons,” said the other lady, sorting out some worsteds on
her lap.

a“ Tiideod, ma’am, you can know nothing of them if you say

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