“I never,” said she, “find abolitionists quoting the whole of the verse which says:  ‘and hath made of one blood all the nations of the earth.’”

“What,” said I, “do they leave out?”

“‘And hath fixed the bounds of their habitations,’ are some of the next words,” said she.

But you will tire of this.  I will resume my story.  I will only say that I told the lady that some of my gentleman friends would call her a strong-minded woman.

* * * * *

Your letter made me think of something which happened to a lady, a fellow-traveller of ours, a few weeks, ago.  She came here to visit a lady whose husband owns one hundred and fifty slaves.  The morning after she reached the plantation, as she told me, she was awaked by the cracking of whips.  She listened; human voices, raised above the ordinary pitch, were mingling with the sounds.  She lay till she could endure it no longer.  Coming down to the piazza, she saw a white man mending a harness on a horse.  “Those whips,” said she, inquiringly,—­“they have rather interfered with my peace.  Any of the colored people been doing wrong?” He hesitated, and kept on fixing his harness, till, finally, he turned round,—­for he had been standing with his back to her and, as she supposed, to hide his chagrin at being questioned on so trying a subject.  “Truth is, Madam,” said he, taking a large piece of tobacco and a knife from his pocket, and helping himself slowly,—­“truth is, we have so much of this work to do, we have to begin early.  Sorry it disturbed you;” and he gathered up the reins and drove off.

The whips kept up their racket.  “Here,” said she to herself, “is the house of Bondage.  How can I spend a month here?” She thought that she would peep round the house.  Yet she feared that she should be considered as intruding into things which she had better not meddle with.  But the screams became so fearful that she could no longer restrain herself.  She rushed round the corner of the house, and came full against a black woman rinsing some fustian clothes in a tub near the rain-spout.  “Do dear tell me,” said she, “what they are doing to those people.  Who is whipping them?  What have they done?” The black woman stopped, and looked round without taking her hands from her tub, and then said, as she went on rinsing, “Lorfull help you, Missis, dem’s de young uns scaring de birds out of de grain.”

What bliss there was to her in that moment of relief!  Six or eight little negroes were sauntering about at their morning work, each having a rude whip, with tape for a snapper, interrupting the hungry birds at their breakfast.

I expected to see a wretched, down-trodden, alms-house looking set of creatures; for the word slave, and all the changes which are rung on that word, made me think only of people who are convicts, such as you see in the state-prison yard at Charlestown, Mass.  I never expected that they would look me in the face, but would skulk by me as a spy or enemy.  A Christian heart is overjoyed to find what religion and society have done for these colored people.  If one who had never heard of “slavery” should be set down here, the Northern idea of “bondage” would not soon occur to him.