The Captain seized the picture, and, having once fastened his eyes upon it, seemed incapable of removing them.  “This? this her?” he cried.  “Great Caesar!  I should think Surrey would have the fellow out at twenty paces in no time.  Heavens, what a beauty!”

Jim grinned sardonically:  “She is rather pretty, now,—­ain’t she?”

“Pretty! ugh, what an expression! pretty, indeed!  I never saw anything so beautiful.  But what a sad face it is!”

“Sad! well, ’tain’t much wonder.  I guess her life’s been sad enough, in spite of her youth, and her beauty, and her riches, and all the rest.”

“Why, how should that be?”

“Suppose you take another squint at that face.”

“Well.”

“See anything peculiar about it?”

“Nothing except its beauty.”

“Not about the eyes?”

“No,—­only I believe it is they that make the face so sorrowful.”

“Very like.  You generally see just such big mournful-looking eyes in the faces of people that are called—­octoroons.”

“What?” cried the Captain, dropping the picture in his surprise.

“Just so,” Jim answered, picking it up and dusting it carefully before restoring it to its place in his pocket-book.

“So, then, it is part true, after all.”

“True!” exclaimed Jim, angrily,—­“don’t make an ass of yourself, Captain.”

“Why, Given, didn’t you say yourself that she was an octoroon, or some such thing?”

“Suppose I did,—­what then?”

“I should say, then, that Surrey has disgraced himself forever.  He has not only outraged his family and his friends, and scandalized society, but he has run against nature itself.  It’s very plain God Almighty never intended the two races to come together.”

“O, he didn’t, hey?  Had a special despatch from him, that you know all about it?  I’ve heard just such talk before from people who seemed to be pretty well posted about his intentions,—­in this particular matter,—­though I generally noticed they weren’t chaps who were very intimate with him in any other way.”

The Captain laughed.  “Thank you, Jim, for the compliment; but come, you aren’t going to say that nature hasn’t placed a barrier between these people and us? an instinct that repels an Anglo-Saxon from a negro always and everywhere?”

“Ho, ho! that’s good! why, Captain, if you keep on, you’ll make me talk myself into a regular abolitionist.  Instinct, hey?  I’d like to know, then, where all the mulattoes, and the quadroons, and the octoroons come from,—­the yellow-skins and brown-skins and skins so nigh white you can’t tell ’em with your spectacles on!  The darkies must have bleached out amazingly here in America, for you’d have to hunt with a long pole and a telescope to boot to find a straight-out black one anywhere round,—­leastwise that’s my observation.”

“That was slavery.”