Ay, how indeed?  Do you wish to know?  Is your curiosity excited?  Well, I do know how I escaped.  I could tell the most extraordinary adventures that happened to me.  I could show you resemblances to people at home, that would make them blue with rage and you crack your sides with laughter. . . .  And what is the reason I cannot write this paper, having all the facts before me?  The reason is, that walking down St. James Street yesterday, I met a friend who says to me, “Roundabout my boy, have you seen your picture?  Here it is!” And he pulls out a portrait, executed in photography, of your humble servant, as an immense and most unpleasant-featured baboon, with long hairy hands, and called by the waggish artist “A Literary Gorilla.”  O horror!  And now you see why I can’t play off this joke myself, and moralize on the fable, as it has been narrated already de me.

A MISSISSIPPI BUBBLE.

This group of dusky children of the captivity is copied out of a little sketch-book which I carried in many a roundabout journey, and will point a moral as well as any other sketch in the volume.  Yonder drawing* was made in a country where there was such hospitality, friendship, kindness shown to the humble designer, that his eyes do not care to look out for faults, or his pen to note them.  How they sang; how they laughed and grinned; how they scraped, bowed, and complimented you and each other, those negroes of the cities of the Southern parts of the then United States!  My business kept me in the towns; I was but in one negro-plantation village, and there were only women and little children, the men being out a-field.  But there was plenty of cheerfulness in the huts, under the great trees—­I speak of what I saw—­and amidst the dusky bondsmen of the cities.  I witnessed a curious gayety; heard amongst the black folk endless singing, shouting, and laughter; and saw on holidays black gentlemen and ladies arrayed in such splendor and comfort as freeborn workmen in our towns seldom exhibit.  What a grin and bow that dark gentleman performed, who was the porter at the colonel’s, when he said, “You write your name, mas’r, else I will forgot.”  I am not going into the slavery question, I am not an advocate for “the institution,” as I know, madam, by that angry toss of your head, you are about to declare me to be.  For domestic purposes, my dear lady, it seemed to me about the dearest institution that can be devised.  In a house in a Southern city you will find fifteen negroes doing the work which John, the cook, the housemaid, and the help, do perfectly in your own comfortable London house.  And these fifteen negroes are the pick of a family of some eighty or ninety.  Twenty are too sick, or too old for work, let us say:  twenty too clumsy:  twenty are too young, and have to be nursed and watched by ten more.** And master has to maintain the immense crew to do the work of half a dozen willing hands.  No, no; let Mitchell, the exile from poor dear enslaved Ireland, wish for a gang of “fat niggers;” I would as soon you should make me a present of a score of Bengal elephants, when I need but a single stout horse to pull my brougham.