| Then he realized that for such a craft to sell at auction for fifty-five pounds meant that there was small chance for saving her. This same in- fernal law had existed in our own South in my own time, more than thirteen hundred years later, and under it hundreds of freemen who could not prove that they were freemen had been sold into lifelong slavery without the circumstance making any particular im- pression upon me; but the minute law and the auction block came into my personal experience, a thing which had been merely improper before became sud- denly hellish. I sold all my household goods by public auction, and joined a company of merchants who traded by sea, embarking with them at Balsora in a ship which we had fitted out between us. |
