coast of Africa, snatched from some
cannibal's calaboose,--where else they might have been butchered to make
a Dahomeyan holiday,--and set up in a country gentleman's kitchen in
Maryland, where they and their Christian progeny helped to make many a
happy Christmas.

Of this antique Ethiopian couple I remember nothing,--they died long
before I was born,--nor have I gathered any notable _ana_ concerning
them. Only of the father, I learned from my darling old nurse that he
was one hundred and four years old when the Almighty Emancipator set him
free; and from my father, and the brothers and sisters of my mother,
that he possessed in a remarkable degree those simple, childlike
virtues, characteristic of the original domesticated African, which his
daughters Judith and Rachel so richly inherited.

Aunt Judy was one of many slaves set free by my grandfather's will,
partly in reward of faithful service, partly from an impulse of
conscientiousness; for our fine old Maryland gentleman was that social
and political phenomenon, a slaveholder with a practical scruple. Not
that he doubted the moral wholesomeness of the "institution," which, in
his theory, was patriarchal and protective, and in his practice
eminently beneficent;--if he were living this day, I doubt not he would
be found among its most earnest and confident champions;--but he did not
believe in holding human beings in bondage "on principle," as it were,
and for the mere sake of bondage. The patriarchal element was, he
thought, an essential in the moral right of the system, and _that_ no
longer necessary, the system became wrong. Therefore, so soon as it
became clear to him that he (so peculiarly had God blessed him) could
protect, advise, relieve his servants as effectually, they being free,
as if their persons and their poor little goods, their labor and almost
their lives, were at his disposal, he set them at liberty without asking
the advice, or caring for the opinion, of any man; and by the same
instrument which gave them the right to work, think, live, and die for
themselves, he imposed upon his children a solemn responsibility for
their well-being, in the future as in the past,--the honorable care of
seeing to it that their wants were judiciously provided for, their
training virtuous, their instruction useful, their employers just, their
families united, and their homes happy. Those who were already of age
went forth free at once; the minors received their "pap