When I was nearly twelve years old, my kind mistress sickened and died.

Death is better than slavery.

I WAS born a slave; but I never knew it till six years of happy childhood had passed away

There must be sophistry in all this; but the condition of a slave confuses all principles of morality, and, in fact, renders the practice of them impossible.

Hot weather brings out snakes and slaveholders, and I like one class of the venomous creatures as little as I do the other.

The beautiful spring came; and when Nature resumes her loveliness, the human soul is apt to revive also.

But to the slave mother New Year's day comes laden with peculiar sorrows. She sits on her cold cabin floor, watching the children who may all be torn from her the next morning and often does she wish that she and they might die before the day dawns.