My host was unmarried. I do not know his age. I remember that his hair was so much frosted that it was decidedly iron-gray; but I am sure that it must have been prematurely so, on account of the great suffering he had endured. His housekeeper was a large, fat, gross-looking negro woman, one of his own slaves. But she was more than his housekeeper--she was the mother of his children. Here was one of those strange, unaccountable, revolting alliances--far more common than the great world has ever dreamed--that set at defiance the laws of God not only, but all other laws--where the one least attractive of all upon the plantation becomes the master's unholy choice. It hardly required the second look to detect among the groups of colored children that were playing about the yard four who bore to their father the double relation of children and slaves. The two eldest were girls, probably six and eight years old, and they had his light gray eyes, his double chin, and, indeed, all his features much more strongly marked than is usual where both the parents are either white or black. In their color, his white blood preponderated very largely over that of the mother; their hair indicated their African parentage much more positively than their skin. The two boys were much darker than their sisters, and the features of their father were less strongly though indisputably marked. The youngest was a handsome little fellow not more than three or four years old. Here, then, to any one who had seen but a tithe of what had fallen under my observation in years of horseback-riding where I had been in constant communication with masters and slaves, was the full explanation of the intense interest and anxiety of my host in regard to the _schools_ and _laws_ in the free States. Here was a mind agitated with the most terrible conflicts, the most excruciating anxieties, that ever raged in the human heart. Here were the pangs of a guilty conscience in regard to the past; and all the instincts of a father moved to their profoundest depths in behalf of his children, who were legal slaves. He knew, even better than I did, the unutterably terrible future that awaited them as slaves. He knew not only the possibilities but the probabilities in regard to the fate of his daughters, which the laws and the customs of society rendered doubly sure. It was to a mind thus agitated and distressed that I had brought the sweet message, "The blood of Jesus Christ cleanseth from _all_ sin." It was to a spirit thus moved that I unfolded the fullness and the freeness of the forgiveness and salvation purchased by the sufferings and death of the "Lamb of God that taketh away the sins of the world." It was to one thus involved and entangled in the meshes of sin that I spoke of a Deliverer from its thralldom and power. O wondrous message! Often as I have looked into the faces of the vilest of the vile, I have been thrilled and startled at the sound of my own voice as I have