He remembered how his master came to their cabin to comfort them, as he
said; but his mother told him plainly that she did not want any such
comfort. She wished Nelly was dead too. She wished she had never had any
children to grow up and suffer what she had. It was in vain her master
tried to soothe her. He talked like a minister, as he was; but she had
grown almost raving, and she talked to him as she never dared to do
before. She wanted to know why he didn't come to console her when she
lost her other children; "three all at once" she said, "and they're ten
times worse than dead. You never consoled me then at all. Religion?
Pooh! I don't want none of _your_ religion."

And now she, too, was gone. She had been gone more than a year. It was
said that she was hired out to work in another family; but it wasn't so.
They only told her that story to get her away from the children
peaceably. She was sold quite a distance away to a very bad man, who
used her cruelly.

Ned, who was some two years younger than Lewis, and the only brother he
had left, was a wild, careless boy, who raced about among the other
children, and did not seem to think much about anything. Lewis often
wished he could have somebody to talk with, and he wondered if his
mother would ever come back again.

Had he been a poet he might have put his wishes into verses like the
following, in which Mrs. Follen has given beautiful expression to the
wishes of such a slave boy as Lewis:

THE SLAVE BOY'S WISH.

I wish I was that little bird,