relating to slavery.  I will take some of the incidents already related in this letter and let these men review them.  I am perfectly familiar with their style, from having been employed in helping your uncle prepare the notices of new publications for the “——­ Review.”  Here, then, I will give you first a supposed notice of my little book, should I make one, from a Northern religious newspaper, quoting, in all cases, the identical expressions from articles which I have read:—­

“‘The authoress, it seems, is yet in her Paradise of slavery.’  Her ‘opulent friends’ and the slave-holders generally, it would appear, got up little tableaux for her, to impose on her good-nature.  Knowing the times when she took her daily walks, they put the fattest and sleekest black boy whom they could find, into a truckle-cart, and made two of the sons of the ‘most opulent’ citizens race down hill with him.  Slavery, therefore, is not the bad thing she and we had supposed.  The female teacher of a school in the neighborhood of her daily walk was suborned, most probably, by the ‘opulent’ ladies of the place, to practise another pleasing trick.  Two white girls and a black girl were made to practise running with their arms interlocked, and one day, as our friend came in sight, they were pushed out to astonish her with one instance of white girls hugging a negro slave-child.  No doubt our friend, on seeing these three together, soliloquized as follows:—­

  “See Truth, Love, and Mercy in triumph descending,
  All nature now glowing in Eden’s first bloom.”

The old negro, respectable and well off, was one of those rare exceptions to surrounding degradation which you now and then see in Southern cities.  The poor slave in the cars, gentle, timid, quivering, was the true exponent of slavery.  Had our authoress filled her book with such illustrations exclusively, she would have written more truthfully, more for her reputation with the real ‘friends of the slave,’ and, we confess, more in accordance with our taste.”

A writer in a very respectable publication at the North, already referred to, gave us several years ago a curious piece of criticism on some publication which he regarded as too favorable to slavery.  His pages, some of them, were crowded with daggers, in the shape of exclamation marks,—­two, three, four, and, in one instance, five, at the end of quotations from the book under review.  It was he that made the assertion about the “arsenic,” as being “universally in the hands of the slaves.”

I shall now let him review my little stories.  I quote many of his words:—­