"After getting well away from them we lost no time in taking the chains and yokes off our prisoners, and we, in so doing, merely told them that, unless they felt a particular vocation in connection with pistol bullets, they had better keep quiet. "Why all these precautions? you will say. Had we made up our minds to reduce these men to slavery? No, certainly not; they had disgusted us so much that their society was unbearable. But their restoration to liberty might, possibly, lead to their again taking a fancy to their former slaves, and, should they fall on the latter in the midst of their feasting and revelry, a number, if not all, would speedily be recaptured. Then it must be borne in mind that these men looked upon us as robbers and highwaymen, who had attacked a perfectly legitimate caravan, and had plundered respectable traders. "They never gave a thought to what we had done for them. They said, and so far they were right, that we should never have had to protect them if, instead of attacking them, we had allowed them to pursue the even tenour of their way. "And do not imagine, my dear Pommerelle, that all the world will approve of our conduct. There are, even in Europe, plenty of persons inclined to laud the sweets of slavery and to maintain that the slave-traders confer a great boon on the blacks in rescuing them from their own wretched country and landing them in Turkey, where they certainly enjoy a greater amount of ease and comfort than they can do at home. "Without inflicting any lengthy arguments on you, I will commence by saying that the regions inhabited by the negroes are wretched, principally because the interest of the slave-dealers lies in perpetually fomenting in them civil war. I will add that out of every three hundred slaves dragged from their homes, scarcely one-third reach the, comparatively speaking, civilized country alluded to, and that the remainder are left to rot in the desert, victims of fatigue, exhaustion, and disease. "Looking at the question from an elevated point of view, I will sum up in these words—Slavery is a disgrace, is contrary to all the laws of morality, and ought to be opposed in every possible way and destroyed. There you have my sentiments, frankly and concisely expressed, and they are the more worthy of respect, seeing that if I fall back upon my ancestors I find in my maternal great-uncle, the Count de Chabanne, one who was, before the Revolution, the largest slave-holder in St. Domingo. My memory also recalls the fact that I was born in a French colony, Guadaloupe, where slavery was in full force, and that the emancipation, proclaimed by Lamartine, in 1848, and decreed by the Provisional Government, deprived me of the greater portion of my revenues, a circumstance which I cannot regret.