“Why, to worship, Sir, I hope.  It’s holiday.”

“Do they go to church, holidays?”

“Why,” said he, with a smile and bow, “some of the best of ’em, p’raps.”

We returned to the carriage.

“Think,” said your uncle, “of two thousand people at the North spending a part of ‘Artillery Election Day’ in Boston, for example, in going to church!”

“Well,” said Hattie, “if I were not to live another day, I would bless God for having let me live to see these things.  I am so glad to find people happy who I had supposed were weeping and wailing.”

We admonished her that she had not seen the whole of slavery.

A very interesting coincidence happened to us the next day.  We took tea at Rev. Mr. ——­’s.  A splendid bride-cake adorned the table.  As Hattie was admiring the ornaments on the cake, the lady of the clergyman smiled and said,—­

“This is from a colored wedding.”

Sure enough, that black bride whom we saw the day before had sent her minister’s wife this loaf.  Said Miss ——­, “I was hurrying to get a silk dress made last week, but my dressmaker put me off, because she was working for Phillis B.’s wedding.”

We both gave a glance at Hattie.  She sat gazing at Miss ——­, her lips partly open, her eyes moistened,—­a picture in which delight and incredulity were in pleasant strife.

* * * * *

We have been in the interior a fortnight.  One thing filled me with astonishment, soon after I came here, namely, to find widow ladies and their daughters, all through the interior of Southern States, living remote from other habitations, surrounded by twenty, fifty, or a hundred slaves.  Hattie and I spent a week with a widow lady, whose head slave was her overseer.  There was not a white man within a mile of the house.  More than twenty black men, slaves, were in the negro quarter.  I awoke the first night, and said to Hattie,—­

“Do you know that you are ’sleeping on a volcano’?”

“What do you mean, Aunt?  You frighten me.”

“Well, it will not make an eruption to-night,” said I.  “We will examine into it to-morrow.”

At breakfast I asked the lady how she dared to live so.  I told her that we at the North generally fancied Southern people sleeping on their arms, expecting any night to be murdered by their slaves.

“It ought to be so, ought it not?” said she, “according to your Northern theory of slavery; and it may get to be so, if your people persist in some of their ways.  My only fear is of some white men who live about two miles off.  I keep two of my men-servants in the house at night as a protection against white depredators.”

“But,” said Hattie, “there have been insurrections.  Are you not afraid that your slaves will rise and assert their liberty?”

The lady smiled and was evidently hesitating whether to answer seriously or not, when Hattie continued,—­