“Well, then, why do you want to leave me?”

“Mas’r may die, and then who get me?—­I’d rather be a free man.”

After some deliberation, the young master replied, “Nathan, in your place, I think I should feel very much so, myself.  You are free.”

He immediately made him out free papers; deposited a sum of money in the hands of the Quaker, to be judiciously used in assisting him to start in life, and left a very sensible and kind letter of advice to the young man.  That letter was for some time in the writer’s hands.

The author hopes she has done justice to that nobility, generosity, and humanity, which in many cases characterize individuals at the South.  Such instances save us from utter despair of our kind.  But, she asks any person, who knows the world, are such characters common, anywhere?

For many years of her life, the author avoided all reading upon or allusion to the subject of slavery, considering it as too painful to be inquired into, and one which advancing light and civilization would certainly live down.  But, since the legislative act of 1850, when she heard, with perfect surprise and consternation, Christian and humane people actually recommending the remanding escaped fugitives into slavery, as a duty binding on good citizens,—­when she heard, on all hands, from kind, compassionate and estimable people, in the free states of the North, deliberations and discussions as to what Christian duty could be on this head,—­she could only think, These men and Christians cannot know what slavery is; if they did, such a question could never be open for discussion.  And from this arose a desire to exhibit it in a living dramatic reality.  She has endeavored to show it fairly, in its best and its worst phases.  In its best aspect, she has, perhaps, been successful; but, oh! who shall say what yet remains untold in that valley and shadow of death, that lies the other side?

To you, generous, noble-minded men and women, of the South,—­you, whose virtue, and magnanimity and purity of character, are the greater for the severer trial it has encountered,—­to you is her appeal.  Have you not, in your own secret souls, in your own private conversings, felt that there are woes and evils, in this accursed system, far beyond what are here shadowed, or can be shadowed?  Can it be otherwise?  Is man ever a creature to be trusted with wholly irresponsible power?  And does not the slave system, by denying the slave all legal right of testimony, make every individual owner an irresponsible despot?  Can anybody fall to make the inference what the practical result will be?  If there is, as we admit, a public sentiment among you, men of honor, justice and humanity, is there not also another kind of public sentiment among the ruffian, the brutal and debased?  And cannot the ruffian, the brutal, the debased, by slave law, own just as many slaves as the best and purest?  Are the honorable, the just, the high-minded and compassionate, the majority anywhere in this world?