No wonder, Gustavus, that you write such letters as your last, fed and nourished as you are on such things as this.  I took it with me that evening to a missionary party at the house of Judge ——.  I read the lines.  The ladies said nothing for a time, till at last one said to me, “Such things have helped us in seceding.”  The Judge took the lines, looked them over, and, smiling, handed them back to me, saying, “Madam, is Massachusetts a dark place?” “Yes,” said a young gentleman, “and the dark places of the earth are full of the habitations of cruelty.”  “Oh,” said I, “how prejudiced you all are!” Whereupon they all laughed.  “Now,” said I, “you think, no doubt, that the author of such a piece is malign.  I know nothing of its origin, but I venture to say it was written by one whose heart overflows with love to everybody, but who is ’laboring under a delusion.’” I did not tell them of the “delusion” which you were “under,” in the Senior’s room, but I said, “I have a nephew in a New England college who has the Northern evil very badly.  But he is so very kind.  Set him to write poetry about the South and he would produce just such lamentable stanzas.”  Nothing will cure these fancies, about oranges and magnolias not blooming for the little negroes, so well as to bring these good people where they can see them pelting one another with oranges, such as these poets never dreamed of, and making money by selling magnolias to passengers at the railway stations.

“Here beautiful mothers, ’mid splendors untold,” etc.  I went with the wife of a planter to her “Maternal Association” of slave-mothers.  She gathers the fifteen mothers among her servants once a fortnight, and spends an afternoon talking to them about the education of their children, and reading to them; and when she knelt with them and prayed, I cried so all the time that I hardly heard anything.  Oh what a tale of love was that Maternal Association!  “Here beautiful mothers ’mid splendors untold,” etc.;—­those words kept themselves in my thoughts.  Now tell this to some great “friend of the slave,” in Massachusetts, and what will he say?—­“All very good, I dare say; hope she will go a little further, and give those fifteen their liberty.”  I sometimes say, “Must I go back to the North, and hear and read such things?”

Yes, it is such things as these, simple and inconsiderable as you may deem them, which are dividing us irreconcilably, and breaking up the Union.  It is not Messrs. ——­, nor their frenzy, but it is Christian brethren who allow their Sabbath-school children, for example, to say and sing, “I’ve heard mistress telling her sweet little son, what Jesus, the loving, for children has done,” making the impression that such a Christian mother leaves a colored child in her house, without instruction, to draw the inference, if it will, that Jesus, perhaps, will love a “poor little slave!” There are no words to depict the feeling of injustice and cruelty which