These words, uttered a little reproachfully, disposed of the matter.  From that hour to this, the subject of wages has never been broached between us.  When Neb wants clothes he goes and gets them, and they are charged to “Masser Mile;” when he wants money he comes and gets it, never manifesting the least shame or reluctance, but asking for all he has need of, like a man.  Chloe does the same with Lucy, whom she regards, in addition to her having the honour to be my wife, as a sort of substitute for “Miss Grace.”  With this honest couple, Mr. and Mrs. Miles Wallingford, of Clawbonny, and Riversedge; and Union Place, are still nothing but “Masser Mile” and “Miss Lucy;”—­and I once saw an English traveller take out her note-book, and write something very funny, I dare say, when she heard Chloe thus address the mother of three fine children, who were hanging around her knee, and calling her by that, the most endearing of all appellations.  Chloe was indifferent to the note of the traveller, however, still calling her mistress “Miss Lucy,” though the last is now a grandmother.

As for the children of the house of Nebuchadnezzar, truth compels me to say, that they have been largely influenced by the spirit of the age, and that they look on the relation that existed for more than a century, between the Wallingfords and the Clawbonnys, with eyes somewhat different from those of their parents.  They have begun to migrate; and I am not sorry to see them go.  Notwithstanding, the tie will not be wholly broken, so long as any of the older stock remain, tradition leaving many of its traces among them.  Not one has ever left my rule without my consent; and I have procured places for them all, as ambition, or curiosity, has carried them into the world.

As for this new spirit of the age that is doing so much among us, I am not twaddler enough to complain of all change, for I know that many of these changes have had the most beneficial effects.  I am far from thinking that domestic slavery, as it once existed at Clawbonny, is a picture of domestic slavery as it existed throughout the land; but I do believe that the institution, as it was formerly known in New York, was quite as much to the disadvantage of the white man, as to that of the black.  There was always something of the patriarchal character in one of our households, previously to the change in the laws; and the relation of master and slave, in old, permanent families, in which plenty was no stranger, had ever more or less of that which was respectable and endearing.  It is not so much in relation to the abolition spirit, (if it would only confine its exertions to communities over which it may happen to possess some right of control,) that I feel alarmed as in reference to a certain spirit, which appears to think there always must be more and more change, and that in connection with any specific interest, whatever may have been its advancement under previous regimes; nothing