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Show 14 UNCLE TO:i\1 18 CABIN j on, ploxion. Ilo wns activo nnd observing, I dreamy and inactive. He was generous to his friends and equals, but proud, dominant, O\•crbcaring, to inferiors, und utterly unmerciful to whatc\'cr set itself up against him. ~rruthful we both were; he from pride and courage, I from u. sort of abstract idca.1ity. We loved each other about as boys gcncmlly do,- off and on, and in gcneral;-ho was my father's pet, and I my mother's. '' ~rhcre was a morbid sensitiveness and acuteness of fcelinrr in me on all possible subjects, of which he and my fathc7. had no kind of undcrs~"1ding, ond with which they coulcl have no possible sympathy. But mother did; and so, when I had quarrelled with Alfred, and father looked sternly on me, I used to go off to mother's room, and sit by her. I remember just how she used to look, with her pale checks, her dee~, soft, serious eyes, h~r white Urcss,- she always wore wlutc; and I used to tlunk of her whenever I read in Revelations about the saints that were arrayed in fine linen, clean and white. She had a great clcttl of genius of o~o sort and another, part~cuiariy in music; and she used to s1t at her organ, playing fine old majestic music of the Catholic church, and singing with a voice more like an angel than a mortal woman; and I would Jay my head down on her lap, and cry, and dream, and fccl,-oh, immeasurably! - things that I had no language to say ! " In those days, this matter of slavery had never been canvassed as it has now; nobody dreamed of any harm in it. ... " ~fy father was a. born aristocrat. I think, in some preexistent state, he must have been in the hi.crher circles of spirits, and. brought all his old court pride along with him; f~r xt was mgraiQ, bred in the bone, though he was originally o poor and not in qny w~y of noble family. My brother was begotten in his image. UFI:~ AMONG Tim ],OWLY. 15 " Now, an aristocrat, you know, the world over, has no human sympathies, beyond a certain line in society. In England the line is in one place, in Burmah in another, and in America in another; but the aristocrnt of all these countries never goes over it. What would be hardship and distress and injustice in his own class, is a cool mu.itcr of course in another one. My father's dividing line was that of color. Among !tis equals, never was a man more just and generous; but he considered the negro, through all possible graUations of color, as an intermediate link between man and animals, and graded all his ideas of justice or generosity on this hypothesis. I suppose, to be sure, if anybody had asked him, plump anU fair, whether they had human immortal souls, he might have hemmed and hawed, and said yes. But my father was not a. uu:m much troubled with spiritualism ; religious sentiment he had none, beyond a. veneration for God, as decidedly the head of the upper classes. "Well, my father worked some five hundred negroes; he was an inflexible, driving, punctilious business man; everything was to move by system,- to be sustained with unfailing accuracy and precision. Now, if you take into account that all this 'V!'' to be worked out by a set of lazy, twaddling, shiftless laborers, who had grown up, all their lives, in the absence of every possible motive to learn how to do anything but 'shirk,' as you V crmontcrs say, and you '11 sec tha.t there might naturally be, on his pb.ntation, a. great many things that looked horrible and distressing to a sensitive child, like me. "Besides all, he had an overseer,- a. great, tall, slabsided, two-fisted renegade son of Vermont- (begging your pardon),- who had gone through a regular apprenticeship in kmlncss and brutality, and taken his degree to be admitted |