They seemed (if he might so say) to be enveloped by a certain atmosphere of their own; and to see, as it were, through a kind of African medium.

Every object, which met their eyes, came distorted and turned from its true direction.

Even the declarations, which they made on other occasions, seemed wholly strange to them.

They sometimes not only forgot what they had seen, but what they had said; and when to one of them his own testimony to the privy council was read, he mistook it for that of another, whose evidence he declared to be "the merest burlesque in the world." But the House must be aware that there was not only an African medium, but an African logic.

It seemed to be an acknowledged axiom in this; that every person, who offered a slave for sale, had a right to sell him, however fraudulently he might have obtained him.