[The Sable Cloud by Nehemiah Adams]@TWC D-Link bookThe Sable Cloud CHAPTER VIII 38/39
And I must tell you,' he added, 'of my enjoyment in looking on your pastures in autumn,--the sun shining aslant upon them of an afternoon,--and in noticing what shades of scarlet and crimson were given to the picture by the whortleberry leaves, which, I found, contributed most to the coloring of the landscape.
I also saw a peculiarity of the whortleberry's flower, which, when stung by an insect sometimes swells to twenty-five times its natural size, and becomes a fungus.' "'Now,' said I, 'why not apply this,--perhaps you were intending to do so,--and say that society at the North is generally like our whortleberry pastures in autumn, which pleased you so much, with here and there a fungus, made by the sting of radicalism.' "A planter's Northern wife said, 'I should like to move the adoption of that simile.' "'We will have it so,' said the Judge to me, 'if the lady and you tell us that we must.' "'A fungus,' said I, 'gets more attention from one half of the people who go into the woods, than all the pure and beautiful garniture of the pastures.' "The ladies of our company having been rallied for not having done their part in the conversation, and also, of course, having been complimented for keeping silence so long, the wife of one of the planters, a Northern lady, made this remark that considering how God, in his providence, had made such provision for the welfare of the human family through slavery in our land, and, in doing it, had shown mercy and salvation to so many hundreds of thousands of Africans, she thought it both ungrateful and narrow-minded in people anywhere to confine all their thoughts to the incidental evils of the slaves.
She said that in the North she was not an abolitionist, but on coming to the South and finding things so different from that which her fancy had pictured, she had concluded to be very charitable toward the most of her Northern friends who she said were no more in the dark than she herself had been all her days, from reading newspapers and tales which had concealed one whole side of slavery from the view of Northern people.
She added that she preferred life at the North without the blacks, but had found more disinterested benevolence toward them in one year at the South than she had charity to believe existed in the hearts of all the good people at the North toward them, counting in even the professional benevolence of the 'friends of the slave.' "After refreshments, the pastor was called upon to read the Scriptures, and to offer prayer.
He read the fifteenth chapter of Revelation.
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