A”! they shout.  Now you know what shape is A; and diligently you hunt it out wherever it is to be found on your scraps of newspaper.  By slow degrees you toil on, in similar ways, through all the alphabet.  No student of Greek or Hebrew ever deserved so much praise for ingenuity and diligence.  But the years pass on, and still you cannot read.  Your master-brother now and then gives you a copper.  You hoard them, and buy a primer; screening yourself from suspicion, by telling the bookseller that your master wants it for his sister’s little boy.  You find the picture of a cat, with three letters by its side; and now you know how cat is spelt.  Elated with your wonderful discovery, you are eager to catch a minute to study your primer.  Too eager, alas! for your mistress catches you absorbed in it, and your little book is promptly burned.  You are sent to be flogged, and your lacerated back is washed with brine to make it heal quickly.  But in spite of all their efforts, your intelligent mind is too cunning for them.  Before twenty years have passed, you have stumbled along into the Bible; alone in the dark, over a rugged road of vowels and consonants.  You keep the precious volume concealed under a board in the floor, and read it at snatches, by the light of a pine knot.  You read that God has created of one blood all the nations of the earth; and that his commandment is, to do unto others as we would that they should do unto us.  You think of your weeping mother, torn from your tender arms by the cruel slave-trader; of the interdicted light of knowledge; of the Bible kept as a sealed book from all whose skins have a tinge of black, or brown, or yellow; of how those brown and yellow complexions came to be so common; of yourself, the son of the Governor, yet obliged to read the Bible by stealth, under the penalty of a bleeding back washed with brine.  These and many other things revolve in your active mind, and your unwritten inferences are worth whole folios of theological commentaries.

As youth ripens into manhood, life bears for you, as it does for others, its brightest, sweetest flower.  You love young Amy, with rippling black hair, and large dark eyes, with long, silky fringes.  You inherit from your father, the Governor, a taste for beauty warmly-tinted, like Cleopatra’s.  You and Amy are of rank to make a suitable match; for you are the son of a Southern Governor, and she is the daughter of a United States Senator, from the North, who often shared her master’s hospitality; her handsome mother being a portion of that hospitality, and he being large-minded enough to “conquer prejudices.”  You have good sympathy in other respects also, for your mothers were both slaves; and as it is conveniently and profitably arranged for the masters that “the child shall follow the condition of the mother,” you are consequently both of you slaves.  But there are some compensations for your hard lot.  Amy’s simple admiration flatters your vanity.  She considers