But he is so very kind.

Set him to write poetry about the South and he would produce just such lamentable stanzas." Nothing will cure these fancies, about oranges and magnolias not blooming for the little negroes, so well as to bring these good people where they can see them pelting one another with oranges, such as these poets never dreamed of, and making money by selling magnolias to passengers at the railway stations.
"Here beautiful mothers, 'mid splendors untold," etc.

I went with the wife of a planter to her "Maternal Association" of slave-mothers.

She gathers the fifteen mothers among her servants once a fortnight, and spends an afternoon talking to them about the education of their children, and reading to them; and when she knelt with them and prayed, I cried so all the time that I hardly heard anything.

Oh what a tale of love was that Maternal Association! "Here beautiful mothers 'mid splendors untold," etc.;--those words kept themselves in my thoughts.
Now tell this to some great "friend of the slave," in Massachusetts, and what will he say?
--"All very good, I dare say; hope she will go a little further, and give those fifteen their liberty." I sometimes say, "Must I go back to the North, and hear and read such things ?" Yes, it is such things as these, simple and inconsiderable as you may deem them, which are dividing us irreconcilably, and breaking up the Union.