The law
is clear: it doth not require the claimant to prove ye are slaves,
it requireth you to prove ye are not."
I said:
"Dear sir, give us only time to send to Astolat; or give us only
time to send to the Valley of Holiness--"
"Peace, good man, these are extraordinary requests, and you may
not hope to have them granted. It would cost much time, and would
unwarrantably inconvenience your master--"
"_Master_, idiot!" stormed the king. "I have no master, I myself
am the m--"
"Silence, for God's sake!"
I got the words out in time to stop the king. We were in trouble
enough already; it could not help us any to give these people
the notion that we were lunatics.
There is no use in stringing out the details. The earl put us up
and sold us at auction. This same infernal law had existed in
our own South in my own time, more than thirteen hundred years
later, and under it hundreds of freemen who could not prove that
they were freemen had been sold into lifelong slavery without
the circumstance making any particular impression upon me; but the
minute law and the auction block came into my personal experience,
a thing which had been merely improper before became suddenly
hellish.
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