It is humiliating to me, in looking back to the North, to see how injudicious and weak we are in pouring out our sympathy upon a fugitive slave, without discrimination.  The lecture before the Boston audience, already mentioned, contains a perfect illustration of Northern credulity in the case of fugitive slaves.  The lecturer tells us that while reading the printed report of Mr. Everett’s Oration at the inauguration of the Webster statue, a fugitive slave appeared at his door, and, baring his breast and back, showed him the marks of the branding-iron, and the scars from the lash.  At the sight, he says, the paper dropped from his hand.  He “thought of Webster and the Fugitive Slave Law.”

Now this negro was, just as likely as not, one of those characters whom we call jail-birds.  If so, and he had lived at the North, instead of branding-iron and stripes, he might have had parti-colored pants, and manacles, and a record of ten or twenty years in the state’s prison.  But because he ran away from the South, he straightway became, as a matter of course, a martyr and a saint.  Perhaps he was, truly, a saint; and perhaps he was not.

Looking out of the window in a hotel the other day, we saw two white men leading up a black man with a leather bridle around his neck.

“Here, Hattie,” said your Uncle, “here is slavery; now you have it in full bloom.”

The poor fellow was crying and protesting and begging to be released.  Your Uncle stepped out and spoke to a very respectable gentleman whom he met on the piazza.  He could not refrain from expressing some feeling at the sight of a fellow-creature so literally “reduced to the level of the brutes.”  I did not hear the whole of the conversation, for my attention was diverted by two roosters who just then flew at each other and were assailed by a troop of black urchins who tried to scare them apart, pulling their tail-feathers and uttering ludicrous cries.

“You are from the North, sir, I take it,” said the gentleman, in reply to your Uncle.

“I am, sir,” said your Uncle.  “Do you often bridle your slaves in this way, in these parts?  I am seeking for information on the subject of slavery.”

“I shall be happy to give you any,” said the gentleman.  “I am here as a magistrate.”

“I am one at home,” said my husband.

“One of these white men who led the negro,” said the gentleman, “was riding on horseback, and was attracted to a by-place by the screams of a child, and found this black man attempting violence upon a black girl ten years old.  He knocked the fellow down and held him, and called for help.  A white man who came up took the bridle from the horse, to secure the villain with it.  They have with difficulty kept the negroes from putting him to death.”

“We are all ready, sir,” said a sheriff to the gentleman.

“Will you walk into the hall?” said the magistrate to your Uncle.