“Friends! do not stand thus fixed in sorrow around this bed of death.  Why are you so still and silent?  Fear not to move; you cannot disturb the visions that enchant this holy spirit.  She heeds you not; already she sees the spirits of the just advancing together to receive a kindred soul.  She is going to add another to the myriads of the just, that are every moment crowding into the portals of heaven.  She is entering on a noble life.  Already she cries to you from the regions of bliss.  Will you not join her there?  Will you not taste the sublime joys of faith?  There are seats for you in the assembly of the just made perfect, in the innumerable company of angels, where is Jesus, the Mediator of the New Covenant, and God, the Judge of all.”

CONCLUDING REMARKS.

I must be allowed to quote the words of Mrs. Harriet B. Stowe: 

“The writer has often been (or will be) inquired of by correspondents from different parts of the country, whether this narrative is a true one; and to these inquiries she will give one general answer.  The separate incidents that compose the narrative are to a very great extent authentic, occurring, many of them, either under her own observation, or that of her personal friends.  She or her friends have observed characters the counterpart of almost all that are here introduced; and many of the sayings are word for word as heard herself, or reported to her.”

Of the planter Legree, (and, with the exception of Prof.  Webster, such a wretch never darkened humanity,) she says: 

“Of him her brother wrote, he actually made me feel of his fist, which was like a blacksmith’s hammer or a nodule of iron, telling me that it was calloused with knocking down niggers.”

Now as a parallel to this, I will state a fact communicated to me by a clergyman, (a man of great talent, and goodness of character, and undoubted veracity,) that a superintendent of Irishmen, who were engaged on a Northern railroad, told him he did not hesitate to knock any man down that gave him the least trouble; and although the clergyman did not “examine his fist and pronounce it like a blacksmith’s hammer,” yet, I have not the slightest doubt it was “calloused with knocking down Irishmen.”  At any rate, I take the license of the writers of the day, and say it was.

Mrs. Stowe goes on to say, “That the tragical fate of Tom also has too many times had its parallel, there are living witnesses all over our land to testify.”  Now it would take the smallest portion of common sense to know that there is no witness, dead or living, who could testify to such a fact, save a false witness.  This whole history is an absurdity.  No master would be fool enough to sell the best hand on his estate; one who directed, and saved, and managed for him.  No master would be brutish enough to sell the man who had nursed him and his children, who loved him like a son, even for urgent debt, had he another article of property in the wide world.  But Mr. Shelby does so, according to Mrs. Stowe, though he has a great many other servants, besides houses and lands, &c.  Preposterous!