The slave girl is reared in an atmosphere of licentiousness and fear.

Notwithstanding my grandmother's long and faithful service to her owners, not one of her children escaped the auction block. These God-breathing machines are no more, in the sight of their masters, than the cotton they plant, or the horses they tend.

My master had power and law on his side; I had a determined will. There is might in each.

Always it gave me a pang that my children had no lawful claim to a name.

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.

Lives that flash in sunshine, and lives that are born in tears, receive their hue from circumstances.