great, square, dusty chamber where, sitting cross-legged, leaning
against the wall, or lying on foul blanket pallets on the floor, the
bargains of to-day made their brief sojourn, awaiting transformation
into the profits of the morrow.

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

For the slave-trader there was no capital so valuable as the physical
soundness of his stock; the moral was easily enough forged or
counterfeited. Little Mammy's good-for-nothing mother was sold as
readily as a vote, in the parlance of to-day; but no one would pay
for a crippled baby. The mother herself would not have taken her as
a gift, had it been in the nature of a negro-trader to give
away anything. Some doctoring was done,--so little Mammy heard
traditionally,--some effort made to get her marketable. There were
attempts to pair her off as a twin sister of various correspondencies
in age, size, and color, and to palm her off, as a substitute,
at migratory, bereaved, overfull breasts. Nothing equaled a
negro-trader's will and power for fraud, except the hereditary
distrust and watchfulness which it bred and maintained. And so, in the
even balance between the two categories, the little cripple remained a
fixture in the stream of life that passed through that back room,
in the fluxes and refluxes of buying and selling; not valueless,
however--rely upon a negro-trader for discovering values as
substitutes, as panaceas. She earned her nourishment, and Providence
did not let it kill the little animal before the emancipation of