Eliza informs Tom that he and her son, Harry, are about to be sold off to a particularly course slave trader. Eliza resolves to flee to Canada to find freedom and protect her boy, but Tom says that he will do the right thing and take the terrible news completely upon himself so as to spare the rest of the plantation any punishment. He says that it's the right thing to sacrifice himself like this, the godly thing, and then he collapses into his chair and starts crying. At which point, Harriet Beecher Stowe's narration gives its best quote so far in the novel:

"Just such tears, sir, as you dropped into the coffin where lay your first-born son; such tears, woman, as you shed when you heard the cries of your dying babe. For, sir, he was but a man, -- and you are and you are but another man. And, woman, though dressed in silk and jewels, you are but a woman, and, in life's great and mighty griefs, ye feel but one sorrow!"