In addition to the plantation negroes and the often petted and spoiled household servants, there was among the coloured population of the South a certain proportion of skilled mechanics. These were not only, from their superior intelligence, more alive than the rest of their race to the hardship of slavery, but, from their greater value, more apt to suffer from it. Why, for instance, should Jim, a good blacksmith, trifle his time away on the plantation, where there was little or nothing for him to do, when Smith in the adjacent town will give Jim’s master, always in need of money, handsome payment for the slave’s services? The master is perhaps a kind man, and Smith known to be just the reverse, but hiring is not like selling. And so Jim goes, and toils in the sweat of his brow till Smith’s payment to the master is wrung out from him a thousandfold. It is of one of these mechanics I am going to tell you, and, excepting that the names of the persons connected with the story have been changed, every word of Abe’s story is true. In the heart of West Virginia, on the picturesque banks of the Great Kanawha River, there is a large tract of land once owned by Washington. Besides the niece who afterwards became Mrs Parke Custis, Washington had another in whom he was greatly interested, the daughter of his brother Lawrence. This lady, much against the wishes of her distinguished uncle, became the wife of Major Parks of Baltimore; and when this gallant officer, fulfilling Washington’s predictions, had spent all he could lay his hands upon and a great deal more, the couple, for his sins, were banished to what was then the wilderness of Western Virginia. Their daughter in course of time married Mr Prescott, a rich young planter from the east, whose money, laid out on the Washington acres, produced a flourishing plantation; while on one of the most romantic sites on the Kanawha arose a noble mansion known as Prescott Place. Here Mrs Prescott exercised for years a lavish hospitality; and here were preserved, until fire consumed them and the mansion together, sundry relics of Washington, chief of which was a characteristic letter to his niece, written before her marriage, warning her that as she made her bed, so she should lie upon it.