Anxious days and desolate nights pass. There is such a heavy pain at
your heart, it is a mystery to yourself that you do not die. At
last, Amy contrives to meet you, pale and wretched as yourself. She
has a mournful story to tell of degrading propositions, and terrible
threats. She promises to love you always, and be faithful to you
till death, come what may. Poor Amy! When she said that, she did not
realize how powerless is the slave, in the hands of an unprincipled
master. Your interview was watched, and while you were sobbing in
each other's arms, you were seized and ordered to receive a hundred
lashes. While you are lying in jail, stiff with your wounds, your
master-brother comes to tell you he has sold you to a trader from
Arkansas. You remind him of the receipt he has given you for six
hundred dollars, and ask him to return the money. He laughs in your
face, and tells you his receipt is worth no more than so much brown
paper; that no contracts with a slave are binding. He coolly adds,
"Besides, it has taken all my spare money to buy Amy." Perhaps you
would have killed him in that moment of desperation, even with the
certainty of being burnt to cinders for the deed, but you are too
horribly wounded by the lash to be able to spring upon him. In that
helpless condition, you are manacled and carried off by the
slave-trader. Never again will Amy's gentle eyes look into yours.
What she suffers you will never know. She is suddenly wrenched from
your youth, as your mother was from your childhood. The pall of
silence falls over all her future. She cannot read or write; and the
post-office was not instituted for slaves.

Looking back on that dark period of desolation and despair, you
marvel how you lived through it. But the nature of youth is elastic.
You have learned that law offers colored men nothing but its
_penalties_; that white men engross all its _protection_; still you