er's house. She
told me that she recognized bits of her own conversation in some of the
sayings of Ethel Newcome, and I have little doubt that in depicting the
beautiful and noble though wayward girl he had in mind something of the
aspect and character of the lovely Sally Baxter. In his correspondence
with the family he was sometimes very playful, as when he wrote to Mrs.
Baxter thanking her for the "wickled palnuts and pandy breaches," which
she had lately sent him.

When we left Havana our new friends went with us to Charleston, and
invited us to visit them at their home in Columbia, S. C. This we were
glad to do. The house at which the Hamptons received us belonged to an
elder brother, Wade Hampton, whose family were at this time traveling in
Europe. Wade Hampton called upon Dr. Howe, and soon introduced a topic
which we would gladly have avoided, namely, the strained relations
between the North and the South. "We mean to fight for it," said Wade
Hampton. But Dr. Howe afterwards said to me: "They cannot be in earnest
about meaning to fight. It would be too insane, too fatal to their own
interests." So indeed it proved, but they then knew us as little as we
knew them. They thought that we could not fight, and we thought that
they would not. Both parties were soon made wiser by sad experience.

My account of this trip, after publication in the "Atlantic Monthly,"
was issued in book form by Ticknor and Fields. Years after this time, a
friend of mine landed in Cuba with a copy of the book in her hand
luggage. It was at once taken from her by the custom-house officers, and
she never saw it again. This little work was favorably spoken of and
well received, but it did not please everybody. In one of its chapters,
speaking of the natural indolence of the negroes in tropical countries,
I had ventured to express the opinion that compulsory employment is
better than none. Good Mr. Garrison seized upon this sentence, and
impaled it in a column of "The Liberator" headed, "The Refuge of
Oppression." I certainly did not intend it as an argument in favor of
negro slavery. As an abstract proposition, and without reference to
color, I still think it true.

The publication of my Cuban notes brought me an invitation to chronicle
the events of the season at Newport for the "New York Tribune." This was
the beginning of a correspondence with that paper which lasted well into
the time of the civil war. My letters dealt somewhat with socia