for a moment; as
the opening door of a church suffers a few notes of the psalm to reach
the ear of one at a distance, this letter, written evidently amidst
household duties and cares, discloses, in a touching manner, the
domestic relations of Southern families and their servants wherever
Christianity prevails. It is one strain of the ordinary music of life in
ten thousands of those households, falling accidentally upon our ears,
and giving us truthful, artless impressions, such as labored statements
and solemn depositions would not so well convey, and which theories,
counter-statements, arguments, and invectives never can refute. Our
senior pastor would say that the letter is like the Epistles of
John,--not a doctrinal exposition, but a breathing forth of the spirit
which the evangelical history had inspired. I have come to know more,
however, than I did when I could have had such amiable but unenlightened
feelings. I have read the "Key to Uncle Tom" and the "Barbarism of
Slavery."

Still, I am sorely puzzled. "Kate," she says, "wanted to have it go, it
had been sick so long; but I knew, when she said it, she did not know
what the parting would be."

"The parting!" Has she read our Northern abstracts and versions of the
Dred Scott Decision, and are there, in her view, any rights in a negro
which she is bound to respect? Has she not heard that the Supreme Court
of the United States has absolved her from all her feelings of humanity?
"The parting!" Where has she lived not to know how, according to our
lecturers, families are parted at the auction-block in the Southern
States without the least compunction? We are constantly told,--has she
not heard it?--that the slave at the South is a mere "chattel," and that
a slave-child is bought and sold as recklessly as a calf, and that a
parting between a slave-mother and her children, sold and separated for
life, is an occurrence as familiar as the separation of animals and
their young, and no more regarded by slave-holders than divorcements in
the barn-yard. This being so, it must follow that when a slave-babe
dies, the only sorrow in the hearts of the white owners is such as they
feel when a colt is kicked to death or a heifer is choked. This must be
so, if all is true which is meant to be conveyed when we are told so
often at the North that the slave is a mere "chattel." Therefore I am
puzzled by this lady's tears for the mother of this little black babe.
She says of the moth