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 in-
fernal 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