The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2 No 4, October, 1862

''– I'll take seven hundred dollars for the woman.'

'Meminger threw his bridle-rein to me, and slid down from his horse to look at the girl. He stepped up to her, caught her upper lip with one hand and her lower with the other, and opened her mouth, and examined her teeth in the same manner that you or I, Owen, would a horse. Then he took her by the arm, twirled her round, struck her roughly on her back, felt the muscle of her fore-arm, her thigh, and calf; then stood back and examined her all over a moment, and said:

''I suppose she is all right? I don't want her, but I am going right home, and I can take her along as well as not, and I'll give you six hundred dollars for her. If you want it, say so at once, for I an't going to stand here talking all day!'

'The man seemed reluctant to take the sum offered—said she was worth more, and he ought to give six hundred and fifty for her.

'Meminger cut him short with a savage oath, telling him that if he wasn't going to accept the six hundred, to say so, for he would not stand there in the cold any longer for the six hundred dollars, niggar and all, and he moved toward his horse as if to remount.

''Well, then,' said the man, who seemed determined to sell her at some price, 'take her at six hundred if that's all you'll give.'

'Meminger drew out a blank bill of sale—that's the way they do it, you know, have to have it in writing—and said to me:

''Here, Tom, you fill out this for me, for my hands have got so cold I can't write.'

'He took a pen and ink from his pocket, and I filled out the bill of sale while he counted down six hundred dollars in bills on the Northern Bank of Kentucky, and paid them over. By the time the man had signed the bill the ink was frozen solid.

''Hurry up!' says Meminger.

'The man having received his money, caught the child from its mother's arms and started for the house without saying another word.

'The woman had all this time been shivering with the cold, and apparently wholly occupied with the child in endeavoring to keep it warm. She pressed it to her bosom, examined the ragged covering with care and tenderness, and strove to draw her own scanty garment over it. She seemed, in fact, so engrossed with her care of the child that she had not comprehended that part of the negotiation which threatened to part her from it. Perhaps she did not, in her blind maternal confidence, conceive such a thing possible!

'When the child was roughly snatched from her, she paused an instant, as if collecting her thoughts, and then, awakening to the reality of the case, she started wildly after it. But Meminger was too quick for her. He was used to such scenes. He caught her before she had gone three steps, and rudely threw her down. She uttered scream after scream, and implored him not to part her from her child. Turning alternately from the unfeeling and repulsive countenance of the slave-trader to the retreating form of her late master, who bore away farther and farther from her all that she knew of love or hope on earth, her impassioned entreaties touched every key-note of human agony from frenzy to despair. It was of no use. Meminger regarded her feelings no more than I regarded the lowings of my stock when I was in the droving business.

'He mounted his horse, brought him up alongside of a low bank, and ordered the woman to get up behind him. This she did as one accustomed to obey, groaning and crying piteously. He placed her behind his saddle, astride of the horse as if she were a man. In this position, what dress she had on, and it was not much, was necessarily drawn up above her knees. She had an old pair of scuffs of shoes on, the rest of the limbs were bare. And in this way we went on through the cold, she shivering, sobbing, and clinging to the negro-trader, all the way to Lexington. Only at Nicholasville, I persuaded Meminger to alight and get some clothes to wrap up the girl's legs to prevent them from being frosted before he got her home.'

'And do you really think she had a mother's affection for her child, and felt its loss as acutely as other mothers—white mothers?' I asked him.

'Do I think so?' he asked, almost fiercely. 'Come here, Henry Clay!' and he reached down and lifted his boy up into his huge arms and kissed him with fervor.

'Do you see that boy? Do you think his white mother loves him?' he asked.

'No doubt of it,' I answered.

'And I tell you, Owen Glendower,' he resumed, 'that just as my wife, Mrs. Winters, loves this boy, did that black mother love her child. More strongly, more firmly did she love it; more frantically did she bewail its loss, because her reason did not suggest any hope of its ultimate recovery, such as might be entertained by an intelligent white woman. And when it was suddenly snatched from her bosom, on that cold day, by the Kentucky River, it was as much lost to her as if it had been snatched by the hand of death instead of that of her inhuman master.'

'This was a single instance, you may say; but if I've seen one, I've seen fifty such. Not all alike, but varying with circumstance, locality, and occasion; and yet all due alike to the essential elements of human slavery, and inseparable from the institution.'

My time was up. I bade adieu to my hostess, shook Tom Winters' hand, and started for the cars with a feeling of satisfaction at having encountered him again, even if it should be for the last time.

THE WHITE HILLS IN OCTOBER

Our town friends, who fly from the heat and dust, and menacing diseases and insupportable ennui, of their city residence during the months of July and August, may have an escape, but they have little enjoyment. We admire the heroism with which they endure, year after year, the discomforts of a country hotel, or the packing in the narrow, half-furnished bed-rooms and rather warm attics of rural lodging-houses, and the general abatement and contraction of creature-comforts, in such startling contrast to the abounding luxuries of their own city palaces. But they are right. The country, at any discount, is better, in the fearful heats of July and August, than the town with its hot, unquiet nights and polluted air. Any hillside or valley in the country, and a shelter under any roof in or upon them, with the broad cope of heaven above, (not cut into patches and fragments by intervening walls and chimney-tops,) and broad fields, and grass, and corn, and woodlands, and their flowers and freshening dews and breezes, and all Nature's infinite variety, is better than every appliance and contrivance of luxury, with the din, the suffocation, and unrest of city life.

Yes, our city friends are right in their summer flight from

'–the street,
Filled with its ever-shifting train;'

but they must not flatter themselves that their mere glimpse of country life—their mere snatch at its midsummer beauty, the one free-drawn breath of their wearied spirit—is acquaintance with it. As well might one who had seen Rosalind, the most versatile of Shakspeare's heroines, only in her court-dress at her uncle the duke's ball, guess at her infinite variety of charm in the Forest of Ardennes. Nature holds her drawing-room in July and August. She wears her fullest and richest dresses then; if we may speak flippantly without offense to the simplicity of her majesty, she is then en pleine toilette. But any other of the twelve is more picturesque than the summer months: blustering March, with its gushing streams tossing off their icy fetters; changeful April, with its greening fields and glancing birds; sweet, budding, blossoming May; flowery June; fruitful September; golden, glorious October; dreary, thoughtful November; and all of Winter, with its potent majesty and heroic adversity.

But let our citizens come to our rural districts; the more, the better for them! Only let them not imagine they get that 'enough' which is 'as good as a feast.'

This preamble was naturally suggested by our autumnal life in the country, and by a recurrence to a late delightful passage through the 'White Hills of New Hampshire.'

'That resort of people that do pass
In travel to and fro'

during the intense months of July and August, we found in October so free from visitors, that we might have fancied ourselves the discoverers of that upland region of beauty, unparalleled, so far as we know, in all the traveled parts of our country. And for the benefit of those who shall come after us, for all who have their highest enjoyment, perhaps their best instruction, in Nature's 'free school,' we intended to give some brief notices of our tour, in the hope of extending the traveling season into October by imparting some faint idea of the startling beauty of this brilliant month in the mountains; but what we might have said was happily superseded.

At a little inn in a small town, after we came down from the 'high places,' we met a party of friends who had preceded us along the whole route by a day. A rain came on, and we were detained together for twenty-four hours. We agreed to pass the evening in a reciprocal reading of the brief notes of our journey. It came last to the turn of my friend, a very charming young person, whom I shall take the liberty to call Mary Langdon. She blushed and stammered, and protested against being a party to the contribution.

'Mine,' she said, 'is a long letter to my cousin, which I began before we left home.'

'So much the better,' we rejoined, 'for the pleasure will be the longer.'

'But it has been written in every mood of feeling.'

'Therefore,' we urged, 'the more variety.'

At last, driven to the wall, she threw a nice morocco letter-case into my lap, saying:

'Take it and read it to yourself, and you will see why I positively can not read it aloud.'

So we gave up our entreaties. I read the letter-journal after I went to my room. The reading cheated me of an hour's sleep; perhaps because I had just intensely enjoyed the country my friend described; and in the morning I begged Miss Langdon's permission to publish it. She at first vehemently objected, saying it would be in the highest degree indelicate to publish so much of her own story as was inextricably interwoven with the journey.

'But, dear child,' I urged, 'who that reads The Continental knows you? And besides, when this is published, (if indeed the Messrs. Editors of that popular journal graciously permit it to see the light,) you will be on the other side of the Atlantic; and before you return, this record will be forgotten, for, alas! we contributors to Monthlies do not write for immortality.'

'But for the briefest mortality I am not fitted to write,' she pleaded.

I rather smiled at the novelty of one hesitating to write for the public because not fitted for the task; and, thinking of 'the fools that rushed in,' (there is small aptness in the remainder of the familiar quotation,) I continued to urge till my young friend yielded, on my promising to omit passages which relate to the emotions and rites of the inner temple; Mary Langdon not partaking that incomprehensible frankness or child-like hallucination which enables some of our very best writers—Mrs. Browning, for instance—to impart, by sonnets and in various vehicles of prose and verse, to the curious and all-devouring public those secrets from the heart's holy of holies that one would hardly confess to a lover or a priest.

It is to our purpose, writing, as we profess to do, pour l'utile, that our young friend indulged little in sentiment that her circumstances rendered dangerous to her peace, and that, being a country-bred New-England girl, she conscientiously, set down the coarser realities essential to the well-being of a traveler—breakfasts, dinners, etc. But before proceeding to her journal, I must introduce my debutante, if she who will probably make but a single appearance before the public may be so styled.

Mary Langdon is still on the threshold of life; at least those who have reached threescore would deem her so, as she is not more than three-and-twenty. The freshness of her youth has been preserved by a simple and rather retired country-life. A total abstinence from French novels and other light reading has left the purity and candor of her youth unscathed by their blight and weather-stain. Would that this tree of the knowledge of evil—not good and evil—were never transplanted into our New World. 'If ye eat of it,' your love of what is natural and simple 'will surely die;' ye will lose your perception of the sweet odors of the flowers Providence has sown along your path, and the vile exhalations from these fruits of corrupted genius will hide from you the star of duty—perhaps Nature's sternest light, but her best.

Mary Langdon's simplicity is that of truth, not of ignorance. Her father has given her what he calls 'a good old-fashioned English education;' that means, he says, that 'she thoroughly knows how to read, write, and cipher, which few girls brought up at French boarding-schools do.' As might be suspected from the practical ideas in her narrative, our young friend has had that complete development of her faculties which arises out of the necessities of country-life in its best aspects. There is hardly a position in our country, now, so isolated but one may 'follow the arts' if one chooses, foreign artists and accomplished exiles pervading our country parts. Mary has availed herself of the facilities thus afforded to cultivate a musical talent and temperament, and acquire enough of the foreign languages to open their literature to her. Strangers do not call Mary Langdon handsome; but her friends do, and they marvel that her fair oval face, her spirited expression, tempered by the sweetest mouth and most pearly and expressive teeth, do not strike all eyes. And then she is so buoyant, so free of step and frank of speech, that while others are slowly winding their way to your affections, she springs into your heart.

With due respect to seniority, we should have presented Mr. Langdon before his daughter. On being called on for his journal, he said he was not 'such a confounded fool as to keep one for any portion of his life. He should as soon think of crystallizing soap-bubbles. He had dotted down a few memoranda in his memorandum book, as warnings to future travelers, and we were welcome to them; though he thought we were too mountain-mad to profit by them, if indeed any body ever profited by any body else's experience!' The fact was, the dear old gentleman had left home in a very unquiet state of mind. He hated at all times leaving his home, abounding in comforts. He detested travel under what he termed 'alleviating circumstances.' He was rather addicted to growling; this English instinct came over with his progenitor in the Mayflower, and half a dozen generations had not sufficed to subdue it. But Mr. Langdon's 'bark is worse than his bite.' In truth his 'bite' is like that of a teething child's, resulting from a derangement of sweet and loving elements.

We found our old friend's memoranda so strongly resembling the grumbling of our traveling cousins from over the water, that we think it may be edifying to print it in a parallel column, as a per contra, illustrating the effects of the lights or shadows that emanate from our own minds. Providence provides the banquet; its relish or disrelish depends on the appetite of the guest.

But to Mary Langdon's letter, which, as it was begun before she left home, bears its first date there:

'Lake-Side, 28th September.—My Dear Sue: I have not much more to tell you than my last contained. Carl Heiner left our neighborhood last week, determined to return by the next steamer to Dusseldorf. We were both very wretched at this final parting. But as I have often seen people making great sacrifices to others, and then letting them lose all the benefit of the sacrifice, by the manner of it, I summoned up courage, and appeared before my father calm and acquiescing, and—you will think me passionless, perhaps hard-hearted—I soon became so. I read, over and over again, your arguments, and I confess I was willing to be persuaded by them. But, after all, my point of sight is not yours, and you can not see objects in the proportions and relations that I do. You say I have exaggerated notions of filial duty, that I have come to mature age and ripe judgment, and that I should decide and act for myself; that in the nature of things the conjugal must supersede the filial relation, and that I have no right to sacrifice my life-long happiness to the remnant of my father's days; and above all, that I am foolish to give in to his prejudices, and selfishness, you added, dear, and did not quite efface the word. Now I see there is much reason in what you say, and I have only to answer that I can not leave my father with a shadow of his disapprobation. I can not and I will not. Our hearts have grown together. God forms the bond that ties the child to the parent, and we make the other, and rotten it often proves. Susy, you lost your parents when you were so young, that you can not tell what I feel for my surviving one. Since my mother's death and Alice's marriage, he has lived in such dependence on me, that I can't tell what his life would be if I were to leave him; and I will not. You tell me this is unnatural, and a satisfactory proof to you that I do not love Carl Heiner. O Sue–'

'Here must be our first hiatus. We can only say that the outpouring of our young friend's heart satisfied us that beneath her serene surface there was an unfathomable well of feeling, and that her friend must have been convinced that 'love's reason' is not always without reason. The letter proceeds: