As inquiries and answers rapidly passed, and
the conviction deepened that this was their sister, the very sister
they had heard so much of, but had never seen, (for she was the
self-same sister that had been locked in the great old fashioned
sleigh-box, when she was taken away, never to behold her mother's face
again this side the spirit-land, and Michael, the narrator, was the
brother who had shared her fate,) Isabella thought, 'D-h! here she was;
we met; and was I not, at the time, struck with the peculiar feeling of
her hand-the bony hardness so just like mine? and yet I could not know
she was my sister; and now I see she looked so like my mother.' And
Isabella wept, and not alone; Sophia wept, and the strong man,
Michael, mingled his tears with theirs. 'Oh Lord,' inquired Isabella,
'what is this slavery, that it can do such dreadful things? what evil
can it not do?' Well may she ask, for surely the evils it can and does
do, daily and hourly, can never be summed up, till we can see them as
they are recorded by him who writes no errors, and reckons without
mistake. This account, which now varies so widely in the estimate of
different minds, will be viewed alike by all.
Think you, dear reader, when that day comes, the most 'rapid
abolitionist' will say-'Behold, I saw all this while on the earth?'
Will he not rather say, 'Oh, who has conceived the breadth and depth of
this moral malaria, this putrescent plague-spot?' Perhaps the pioneers
in the slave's cause will be as much surprised as any to find that with
all their looking, there remained so much unseen.
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