The communication which I received in response to my invitation was to some extent a surprise.  The letter was a very long one, and very vivid and expressive.  He began it by alluding to the incident upon the play-ground, which had occurred nearly two years before.  He said that his life had been guarded, up to about that time, from feeling the effects of the misfortunes which attach to the colored race.  Living in a remote settlement and a very pleasant home, where all were free and equal and social distinctions almost unknown, he had scarcely thought of the fact that his mother was an octoroon.  He had heard her talk a great deal about those distinguished French gentlemen who had in the early part of this century acquired lands in the vicinity of his home, and he had somehow a feeling that she had been remotely connected with them, and that his own lineage was honorable.  He alluded specifically to Le Ray de Chaumont and Joseph Bonaparte.  These two men, and others their countrymen, who had resided or sojourned upon the edge of the great wilderness near his birthplace, had been his ideals from childhood.  He had often visited Lake Bonaparte, and had frequently seen the home formerly occupied by Le Ray.  While he had understood that he himself was only plain Anthony C. Brown, the son of Thomas Brown (a white man who had died some two months before his son’s birth), he had yet an impression that his mother was in some vague way connected with the great personages whom he mentioned.  How it was that Thomas Brown had come to marry his mother, or what the details of her early life had been, he did not know, being, in fact, ignorant of his family history.  He conceded that it might be only his own imagination that had led him to suppose that he was in some indefinite way to be credited with the greatness of those wealthy landed proprietors who had endeavored to establish manorial estates or seigniories in the wilderness.  He had come to understand that this unexplainable impression of superiority and connection with the great, which had always been with him in childhood and early youth, was due to his mother’s influence and teaching.  There was about it nothing direct and specific, and yet it had been instilled into his mind, in indirect ways, until it was an integral part of his existence.  His mother had a farm and cattle and money.  She was in better circumstances than her neighbors.  This had added to his feeling of superiority and independence.  The accident of a slight tinge of color had hardly risen even to the dignity of a joke in the freedom of the settlement and the forest.  Looking back, he believed that his mother had guarded his youthful mind against receiving any unfavorable impression upon the subject.  In his remote, free, wilderness home he had heard but little of African slavery, and had regarded it as a far-off phantom, like heathendom or witchcraft.