scriptions--and some amusing ones too--of the
operations of this most barbarous law.

One I especially remember. A planter, it seems, had fallen deeply in
love with a charming quadroon girl. He desired to marry her; but the law
forbade. What was he to do? To tarnish her honour was out of the
question; he had too much himself to seek to tarnish hers. Here was a
dilemma. But he was not to be foiled. What true heart will be, if there
be any virtue in expedients?

"----In love,
His thoughts came down like a rushing stream."

At last he got it. A capital thought, which could have crept out of no
one's brain, save that of a most desperate lover. He hit upon the
expedient of extracting a little African blood from the veins of one of
his slaves, and injecting it into his own. The deed done, the letter of
the law was answered. He made proposals, was accepted, and they were
married,--he being willing to risk his caste in obedience to a love
higher and holier than any conventionalism which men have ever contrived
to establish.

O, Cupid, thou art a singular God! and a most amazing philosopher! Thou
goest shooting about with thy electrically charged arrows, bringing to
one common level human hearts, however diverse in clime, caste, or
color.

Let not the reader suppose, however, that the white people of America
are in the habit of exercising such honor towards the people of color,
as is here ascribed to this planter. Far from it. The laws of the
Southern States, on the one hand, (I allude not now to any particular
law of Louisiana, but to the laws of the Slave States in general), have
deliberately, and in cold blood, withheld their protection from every
woman within their borders, in whose veins may flow but half a drop of
African blood; while the prejudice against color of the Northern States,
on the other hand, is so cruel and contemptuous of the rights and
feelings of colored people, that no white man would lose his caste in
debauching the best educated, most accomplished, virtuous and wealthy
colored woman in the community, but would be mobbed from Maine to
Delaware, should he with that same woman attempt honorable marriage.
Henry Ward Beecher, (brother of Mrs. Stowe) in reference to prejudice
against color, has truly said of the Northern people--and the truth in
this case in startling and melancholy--that, "with them it is less
sinful to break the whole decalogue towards the colored people, than to
keep a single c