of my
enjoyment in looking on your pastures in autumn,--the sun shining aslant
upon them of an afternoon,--and in noticing what shades of scarlet and
crimson were given to the picture by the whortleberry leaves, which, I
found, contributed most to the coloring of the landscape. I also saw a
peculiarity of the whortleberry's flower, which, when stung by an insect
sometimes swells to twenty-five times its natural size, and becomes a
fungus.'

"'Now,' said I, 'why not apply this,--perhaps you were intending to do
so,--and say that society at the North is generally like our
whortleberry pastures in autumn, which pleased you so much, with here
and there a fungus, made by the sting of radicalism.'

"A planter's Northern wife said, 'I should like to move the adoption of
that simile.'

"'We will have it so,' said the Judge to me, 'if the lady and you tell
us that we must.'

"'A fungus,' said I, 'gets more attention from one half of the people
who go into the woods, than all the pure and beautiful garniture of the
pastures.'

"The ladies of our company having been rallied for not having done their
part in the conversation, and also, of course, having been complimented
for keeping silence so long, the wife of one of the planters, a Northern
lady, made this remark that considering how God, in his providence, had
made such provision for the welfare of the human family through slavery
in our land, and, in doing it, had shown mercy and salvation to so many
hundreds of thousands of Africans, she thought it both ungrateful and
narrow-minded in people anywhere to confine all their thoughts to the
incidental evils of the slaves. She said that in the North she was not
an abolitionist, but on coming to the South and finding things so
different from that which her fancy had pictured, she had concluded to
be very charitable toward the most of her Northern friends who she said
were no more in the dark than she herself had been all her days, from
reading newspapers and tales which had concealed one whole side of
slavery from the view of Northern people. She added that she preferred
life at the North without the blacks, but had found more disinterested
benevolence toward them in one year at the South than she had charity to
believe existed in the hearts of all the good people at the North toward
them, counting in even the professional benevolence of the 'friends of
the slave.'

"After refreshments, the pastor was called upon to read the