I saw personally but little of the darker side of slavery. The worst pictures I could draw from my own personal knowledge would not be sufficiently hideous to be interesting. The fairest I could draw would be of my old black "mammy." From my infancy she was the comforter, counsellor and guide whose sympathy and assistance never failed me. As dignified as a duchess; as neat in her striped, home-made dress, kerchief and turban as it was possible for mortal to be; jealous of the honor of the family; serene, affectionate, proud of her usefulness,--she is among the first from whom I expect a loving welcome in heaven. My father gave her free papers after she had nursed a sick member of the family with especial faithfulness on one occasion. She locked them up in her trunk, and that was the end of them, except when she took them out to show to her friends. I think it gratified her to receive them, however. I recollect the incredulity of a good lady from Boston, who asked her if she would not like to live there, where there were no masters and mistresses. "No indeed, honey!" was the reply. When a girl I passed a winter in the White House. It was during the last term of General Jackson. That high white head; the perpendicular hair; the clear blue eyes--one moment melting with a woman's tenderness, the next blazing like an angry lion's--peering earnestly from under the great shaggy eyebrows and over the top of the silver spectacles; the furrowed, pained face, worn with suffering and perpetual warfare, but occasionally lighted by a sudden gleam of the old fire, which nothing but death could quench, when his cane would come down with a thump and "By the Eternal!" would break forth--the nearest approach to profanity ever heard from his lips by me, or by anybody, I think, at that period of his life,--how vividly all these come back! I saw him at his best. The storms of life had wellnigh passed. His beloved wife was beckoning him to a world of rest and peace. He was the idol of a majority of his countrymen. He occupied a second time, in obedience to their voices, what he regarded as the most honorable position that any man could hold on earth--the Presidency of the United States. In pursuing what he took to be right he had conquered everybody and everything that opposed him. He had ever been the incarnation of chivalry toward women. It is natural, therefore, that under all these circumstances, in those last days of his and first days of mine, he should have appeared to me a higher type of man than many people would judge him to be from a strictly dispassionate consideration of his whole life. I was never given to hero-worship, but at that time I did come near worshipping this old hero. I am not here questioning the justice of his latest and completest biography--Mr. Parton's--but would simply remark how difficult it is for me, seeing him as I did, and only so, to realize that he was the same being who enlivens some of the earlier scenes of that book.