a white family serve.  When a respectable young woman, therefore, at a boarding-house, brings him his tea, he feels impelled to rise and ask her to be seated, and to wait upon her.  I have been an eye-witness to scenes of this kind, and have been much pleased and not a little amused at some exhibitions of the feeling.  If our sentiments toward the sex, and their position in social life, mark the degree of civilization and cultivation in a community, I am compelled to accord a high degree of it to Southern society, in its best estate.

“This is one effect of slavery.  It takes mothers, wives, daughters, away from occupations which, though honorable, do not always elevate them in the eyes of the other sex.  Perhaps there is no value (and some will say it) in all this; that every labor and service is right and good for woman; and that we are to prefer a state of society where woman does these things with her own hands, instead of having them done for her, and that this is our only safeguard against luxury and degeneracy.  I will not debate it.  I am only showing that, tried by an ordinary test,—­the position of woman,—­Southerners are really not barbarians.”

“I verily believe,” said Mrs. North, “that if you take the Southern constitution and give it a Northern training, the result is as perfect a specimen of man or woman as is to be found on earth.”

“People at the North,” said I, “may, in their zeal against slavery, make light of the abounding sustenance which the slaves enjoy, and call it a low and gross thing in comparison with ‘freedom;’ but, in the view of all political economists and publicists, how to feed the lower classes is a great problem.  It is solved in slavery.

“There is another topic,” I added, “which is interesting and important.

“Here,” said I, taking a newspaper-slip from my wallet, “is something which fairly made me weep.  It is a picture of one of our poor, virtuous, honest New England homes, in which I would rather dwell and suffer, than be an ‘oppressor’ with my hundreds of slaves, and wealth counted by hundreds of thousands.  A slave-holder, blessed be God, is not a synonyme of ‘oppressor;’ nor are the slaves as a matter of course ‘oppressed.’  Our people to a great extent think otherwise, and it is useful to see how we appear to others when this error leads us into folly.  This little picture in the newspaper-slip gives us a transient look into an abode whose honest poverty and want are made more painful by evil-doing under the influence of fanaticism.”

I then read to my friends the following from a Southern paper;—­I here omit the names which are given in full:—­

“The touching letter which was found on the body of ——­ ——­, one of the insurgents, from his sister in ——­, ——­, has been published.  The following paragraph in that letter is a suggestive one: