“Well, ’Cl’erklis (Anglice, Uncle Hercules), why did you make de fine tree dollah?” “Well, de hen war wuf a dollah, easy. Den de boy ought to pay a dollah for stealin’, anyhow. But den, sah, dat hen war a layin’ eggs, and if dat Gawky Sam hadn’t done stole her, de eggs she’d a laid ’ud a been, wuf’t least ’nuther dollah by this time!” And the third Alderman, it was found, had proceeded upon the same basis, but had reckoned the hen more fertile of eggs, or allowed for her having a longer time in which to produce them; and he had made the boy pay for three dollars’ worth of eggs that the hen would have laid for the owner, if she hadn’t been stolen! What new versions of law and justice the Mayor would have given, alas! were lost to the jurisprudence of the Sea Islands, and the case came to an ignoble ending; for Gawky Sam’s father had grown frightened at these successive additions to the fine, and the hen had been hastily carried back to the coop whence she was originally stolen. The Mayor, accordingly, imposed a fine of a dollar for the crime of the theft, and peace reigned again among the Aunties of Mitchelville. * * * * * Ludicrous as was the solemnity of these proceedings, they were, nevertheless, of value, as showing inherent ideas of justice. In the days of slavery every negro believed it right to steal, for was he not stolen, bodily, from himself? And from taking “Massa’s” property, it was no very hard step to taking that of other people. But with freedom have come better practices, and already we are assured that theft is comparatively rare. Whoever has read what I have written about the cotton fields of St. Helena will need no assurance that another cardinal sin of the slave, his laziness—“inborn and ineradicable,” as we were always told by his masters—is likewise disappearing under the stimulus of freedom and necessity. Dishonesty and indolence, then, were the creation of slavery, not the necessary and constitutional faults of the negro character. May it not be reasonably hoped that the other great sin of the slave, his licentiousness, will yet be found to have its origin in the same system, and its end in the responsibilities of educated freedom?