Now, I thought with myself, as I stood and enjoyed the sight, what a palpable and eloquent, though undesigned and silent, refutation that is, of all such Northern chimeras.  If poisons are mixed with articles of food or medicine by the negroes with any noticeable frequency, the sign of a negro compounding medicines for public sale would surely be, to customers, the most detersive sign which an apothecary could erect over his premises.  That little incident, and things like it, which are meeting you at every turn, show the state of things here to be in pleasing contrast to the horrors with which the imaginations of many of us Northerners are peopled.  I find, in the “Charleston Mercury,” a good cut of this “negro and golden mortar,” and I send it to you as an appropriate answer to much of your letter.

Our landlord, driving us about the country the other day, and needing silver change, came to a gang of slaves in a field, and cried out, “Boys, got any silver for a five dollar gold piece?” Several hands went into as many pockets, at once, and a lively fellow among them getting the start, jumped over the fence, and changed the money.  I had been here a month when I received your letter, and when I read it I at first laughed as heartily, I suspect, as “the pro-slavery Senior” did.  Then I pitied you, and I pitied myself for my own former ignorance, and I pitied very many of our Northern people, and, not the least, such persons as poor “Isaiah,” who I know are honest, but are grievously misled.  The word slavery is, to us, an awful word.  Very much of our anti-slavery feeling is a perfectly natural instinct.  You cannot see Java sparrows in a cage, nor even a mother-hen tied to her coop, without a lurking wish to give them liberty.  On thinking of being “a slave,” we immediately make the case our own, and imagine what it would be for us to be in bondage to the will of another.  We cannot easily be convinced that this is not exactly parallel with being one of the slaves at the South, nor that to be a slave does not have these things for its inseparable conditions, which, we imagine, are always obtruding their direful visages; namely, “auction-block,” “overseer,” “whip,” “chattelism,” “separations,” “down-trodden,” “cattle.”  Hence it is easy for orators and preachers to work on our sympathies.  There are scattered facts enough to justify any tale which any public speaker chooses to relate.  I confess that my respect for many of our Northern people has not risen, as I see them from this point of view.  They ought not to be so easily duped, so ready to believe evil, so quickly carried away by partial representations, and so unwilling to take comprehensive views of such a subject as this.  I condemn myself in speaking thus; I partly blame the novel-writers, and the editors of party papers, and political leaders.  But we ought at the North to understand this subject better, to listen willingly to information from great and good men who have spent their lives among the slaves, and