udal fidelity--and what a villain must the man be who would
accept such a gift!

I had never thought much of this subject before I left home. I did not
_like_ slavery, nor to think about it. But in Europe I did like such
thought, and I returned fully impressed with the belief that slavery was,
as Charles Sumner said, "the sum of all crimes." In which summation he
showed himself indeed a "sumner," as it was called of yore. Which cost
me many a bitter hour and much sorrow, for there was hardly a soul whom I
knew, except my mother, to whom an Abolitionist was not simply the same
thing as a disgraceful, discreditable malefactor. Even my father, when
angry with me one day, could think of nothing bitterer than to tell me
that I knew I was _an Abolitionist_. I kept it to myself, but the reader
can have no idea of what I was made to suffer for years in Philadelphia,
where everything Southern was exalted and worshipped with a baseness
below that of the blacks themselves.

For all of which in after years I had full and complete recompense. I
lived to see the young ladies who were ready to kneel before any man who
owned "sla-aves," detest the name of "South," and to learn that their
fathers and friends were battling to the death to set those slaves free.
I lived to see the roof of the "gentlemanly planter," who could not of
yore converse a minute with me without letting me know that he considered
himself as an immeasurably higher being than myself, blaze over his head
amid yell and groan and sabre-stroke--

"And death-shots flying thick and fast,"

while he fled for life, and the freed slaves sang hymns of joy to God. I
saw the roads, five miles wide, level, barren, and crossed with ruts,
where Northern and Southern armies had marched, and where villages and
plantations had once been. I saw countless friends or acquaintances, who
had once smiled with pitying scorn at me, or delicately turned the
conversation when Abolition was mentioned in my presence, become all at
once blatant "nigger-worshippers," abundant in proof that they had always
had "an indescribable horror of slavery"--it was, in fact, so
indescribable that (until it was evident that the North would conquer)
none of them ever succeeded in giving anybody the faintest conception of
it, or any idea that it existed. I can still recall how gingerly and
cautiously--"paw by paw into the water"--these dough faces became hard-
baked Abolitionists, far surpassing