“No, indeed, sir; he hates Jim, and no good, may be, would have come of his knowing it; besides, he was asleep long after Jim went off, and there was too much whiskey in him to depend on what he’d have to say.”

“That will do, Phillis; and see that such a thing never happens again,” said Mr. Weston.

Phillis went back to her ironing, assured her master was not angry with her.  Yet she sighed as she thought of his saying, “see that such a thing never happens again.”  “If it had been a clear night,” she thought within herself, “he shouldn’t have stayed there.  But it was the Lord himself that sent the storm, and I can’t see that he never sends another.  Anyway its done, and can’t be helped;” and Phillis busied herself with her work and her children.

I have not given Phillis’s cottage as a specimen of the cabins of the negroes of the South.  It is described from the house of a favorite servant.  Yet are their cabins generally, healthy and airy.  Interest, as well as a wish for the comfort and happiness of the slave, dictates an attention to his wants and feelings.  “Slavery,” says Voltaire, “is as ancient as war; war as human nature.”  It is to be wished that truth had some such intimate connection with human nature.  Who, for instance, could read without an indignant thought, the following description from the pen of Mrs. Stowe:  “They (their cabins) were rude shells, destitute of any pieces of furniture, except a heap of straw, foul with dirt, spread confusedly over the floor.”  “The small village was alive with no inviting sounds; hoarse, guttural voices, contending at the handmills, where their morsel of hard corn was yet to be ground into meal to fit it for the cake that was to constitute their only supper.”  But such statements need no denial; the very appearance of the slaves themselves show their want of truth.  Look at their sound and healthy limbs, hear the odd, but sweet and musical song that arrests the traveler as he goes on his way; listen to the ready jest which is ever on his lips, and see if the slavery which God has permitted in all ages to exist, is as is here described; and judge if our fair Southern land is tenanted by such fiends as they are represented to be, by those who are trying to make still worse the condition of a mass of God’s creatures, born to a life of toil, but comparative freedom from care.  If it be His will that men should be born free and equal, that will is not revealed in the Bible from the time of the patriarchs to the present day.  There are directions there for the master and the slave.  When the period of emancipation advances, other signs of the times will herald it, besides the uncalled-for interference, and the gross misrepresentations, of the men and women of the North.

Sidney Smith said of a man, who was a great talker, that a few flashes of silence would make a great improvement in him.  So of the Abolition cause, a few flashes of truth would make it decidedly more respectable.