with great fatigue, to select kindly-faced women for nurses;
languid-looking ladies with smooth hair standing out in wide
_bandeaux_ from their heads, and lace shawls dropping from their
sloping shoulders, silk dresses carelessly held up in thumb and finger
from embroidered petticoats that were spread out like tents over huge
hoops which covered whole groups of swarming piccaninnies on the dirty
floor; ladies, pale from illnesses that she might have nursed, and
over-burdened with children whom she might have reared! And not a lady
of that kind saw her face but wanted her, yearned for her, pleaded for
her, coming back secretly to slip silver, and sometimes gold, pieces
into her hand, patting her turbaned head, calling her "little Mammy"
too, instantly, by inspiration, and making the negro-trader give them,
with all sorts of assurances, the refusal of her. She had no need for
the whispered "Buy me, master!" "Buy me, mistress!" "You'll see how I
can work, master!" "You'll never be sorry, mistress!" of the others.
The negro-trader--like hangmen, negro-traders are fitted by nature for
their profession--it came into his head--he had no heart, not even a
negro-trader's heart--that it would be more judicious to seclude her
during these shopping visits, so to speak. She could not have had any
hopes then at all; it must have been all desperations.

That auction-block, that executioner's block, about which so much has
been written--Jacob's ladder, in his dream, was nothing to what that
block appeared nightly in her dreams to her; and the climbers up and
down--well, perhaps Jacob's angels were his hopes, too.

At times she determined to depreciate her usefulness, mar her value,
by renouncing her heart, denying her purpose. For days she would
tie her kerchief over her ears and eyes, and crouch in a corner,
strangling her impulses. She even malingered, refused food, became