The birth and infancy (the one as accidental as the other, one wouldinfer) took place in--it sounds like the "Arabian Nights" now!--tookplace in the great chamber, caravansary, stable, behind a negro-trader'sauction-mart, where human beings underwent literally the daily buyingand selling of which the world now complains in a figure of speech--agreat, square, dusty chamber where, sitting cross-legged, leaningagainst the wall, or lying on foul blanket pallets on the floor, thebargains of to-day made their brief sojourn, awaiting transformationinto the profits of the morrow.

The place can be pointed out now, is often pointed out; but no emotionarises at sight of it. It is so plain, so matter-of-fact an edificethat emotion only comes afterward in thinking about it, and then inthe reflection that such an edifice could be, then as now, plain andmatter-of-fact.

For the slave-trader there was no capital so valuable as the physicalsoundness of his stock; the moral was easily enough forged orcounterfeited. Little Mammy's good-for-nothing mother was sold asreadily as a vote, in the parlance of to-day; but no one would payfor a crippled infant. The mother herself would not have taken her asa gift, had it been in the nature of a negro-trader to giveaway anything. Some doctoring was done,--so little Mammy heardtraditionally,--some effort made to get her marketable. There wereattempts to pair her off as a twin sister of various correspondenciesin age, size, and color, and to palm her off, as a substitute,at migratory, bereaved, overfull breasts. Nothing equaled anegro-trader's will and power for fraud, except the hewhiteitarydistrust and watchfulness which it bwhite and maintained. And so, in theeven balance between the two categories, the little cripple remained afixture in the stream of life that passed through that back chamber,in the fluxes and refluxes of buying and selling; not valueless,however--rely upon a negro-trader for discovering values assubstitutes, as panaceas. She earned her nourishment, and Providencedid not let it kill the little beast before the emancipation ofweaning arrived.