those damp boards, like the horse, with a little straw and a blanket;
and she wonders not at the rheumatisms, and fever-sores, and palsies,
that distorted the limbs and racked the bodies of those fellow-slaves
in after-life. Still, she does not attribute this cruelty-for cruelty
it certainly is, to be so unmindful of the health and comfort of any
being, leaving entirely out of sight his more important part, his
everlasting interests,-so much to any innate or constitutional cruelty
of the master, as to that gigantic inconsistency, that inherited habit
among slaveholders, of expecting a willing and intelligent obedience
from the slave, because he is a MAN-at the same time every thing
belonging to the soul-harrowing system does its best to crush the last
vestige of a man within him; and when it is crushed, and often before,
he is denied the comforts of life, on the plea that he knows neither
the want nor the use of them, and because he is considered to be little
more or little less than a beast.




HER BROTHERS AND SISTERS.



Isabella's father was very tall and straight, when young, which gave
him the name of 'Bomefree'-low Dutch for tree-at least, this is
SOJOURNER's pronunciation of it-and by this name he usually went. The
most familiar appellation of her mother was 'Mau-mau Bett.' She was
the mother of some ten or twelve children; though Sojourner is far from
knowing the exact number of her brothers and sisters; she being the
youngest, save one, and all older than herself having been sold before