“But, Augustine, you don’t know how I found things.”

“Don’t I?  Don’t I know that the rolling-pin is under her bed, and the nutmeg-grater in her pocket with her tobacco,—­that there are sixty-five different sugar-bowls, one in every hole in the house,—­that she washes dishes with a dinner-napkin one day, and with a fragment of an old petticoat the next?  But the upshot is, she gets up glorious dinners, makes superb coffee; and you must judge her as warriors and statesmen are judged, by her success.”

“But the waste,—­the expense!”

“O, well!  Lock everything you can, and keep the key.  Give out by driblets, and never inquire for odds and ends,—­it isn’t best.”

“That troubles me, Augustine.  I can’t help feeling as if these servants were not strictly honest.  Are you sure they can be relied on?”

Augustine laughed immoderately at the grave and anxious face with which Miss Ophelia propounded the question.

“O, cousin, that’s too good,—­honest!—­as if that’s a thing to be expected!  Honest!—­why, of course, they arn’t.  Why should they be?  What upon earth is to make them so?”

“Why don’t you instruct?”

“Instruct!  O, fiddlestick!  What instructing do you think I should do?  I look like it!  As to Marie, she has spirit enough, to be sure, to kill off a whole plantation, if I’d let her manage; but she wouldn’t get the cheatery out of them.”

“Are there no honest ones?”

“Well, now and then one, whom Nature makes so impracticably simple, truthful and faithful, that the worst possible influence can’t destroy it.  But, you see, from the mother’s breast the colored child feels and sees that there are none but underhand ways open to it.  It can get along no other way with its parents, its mistress, its young master and missie play-fellows.  Cunning and deception become necessary, inevitable habits.  It isn’t fair to expect anything else of him.  He ought not to be punished for it.  As to honesty, the slave is kept in that dependent, semi-childish state, that there is no making him realize the rights of property, or feel that his master’s goods are not his own, if he can get them.  For my part, I don’t see how they can be honest.  Such a fellow as Tom, here, is,—­is a moral miracle!”

“And what becomes of their souls?” said Miss Ophelia.

“That isn’t my affair, as I know of,” said St. Clare; “I am only dealing in facts of the present life.  The fact is, that the whole race are pretty generally understood to be turned over to the devil, for our benefit, in this world, however it may turn out in another!”

“This is perfectly horrible!” said Miss Ophelia; “you ought to be ashamed of yourselves!”

“I don’t know as I am.  We are in pretty good company, for all that,” said St. Clare, “as people in the broad road generally are.  Look at the high and the low, all the world over, and it’s the same story,—­the lower class used up, body, soul and spirit, for the good of the upper.  It is so in England; it is so everywhere; and yet all Christendom stands aghast, with virtuous indignation, because we do the thing in a little different shape from what they do it.”