n the higher circles of spirits, and brought all his old
court pride along with him; for it was ingrain, bred in the bone, though
he was originally of poor and not in any way of noble family. My brother
was begotten in his image.

"Now, an aristocrat, you know, the world over, has no human sympathies,
beyond a certain line in society. In England the line is in one place,
in Burmah in another, and in America in another; but the aristocrat
of all these countries never goes over it. What would be hardship and
distress and injustice in his own class, is a cool matter of course in
another one. My father's dividing line was that of color. _Among his
equals_, never was a man more just and generous; but he considered the
negro, through all possible gradations of color, as an intermediate
link between man and animals, and graded all his ideas of justice or
generosity on this hypothesis. I suppose, to be sure, if anybody had
asked him, plump and fair, whether they had human immortal souls, he
might have hemmed and hawed, and said yes. But my father was not a man
much troubled with spiritualism; religious sentiment he had none, beyond
a veneration for God, as decidedly the head of the upper classes.

"Well, my father worked some five hundred negroes; he was an inflexible,
driving, punctilious business man; everything was to move by system,--to
be sustained with unfailing accuracy and precision. Now, if you take
into account that all this was to be worked out by a set of lazy,
twaddling, shiftless laborers, who had grown up, all their lives, in
the absence of every possible motive to learn how to do anything
but 'shirk,' as you Vermonters say, and you'll see that there might
naturally be, on his plantation, a great many things that looked
horrible and distressing to a sensitive child, like me.

"Besides all, he had an overseer,--great, tall, slab-sided, two-fisted
renegade son of Vermont--(begging your pardon),--who had gone through a
regular apprenticeship in hardness and brutality and taken his degree to
be admitted to practice. My mother never could endure him, nor I; but
he obtained an entire ascendency over my father; and this man was the
absolute despot of the estate.

"I was a little fellow then, but I had the same love that I have now for
all kinds of human things,--a kind of passion for the study of humanity,
come in what shape it would. I was found in the cabins and among the
field-hands a great deal, and, of course, w