Doubtless there were many instances of "pampered and petted" household servants who had grown up in families who had sense to know that they could never live free in the freezing North without hard work. These were the only devoted ones of whom I ever heard. The field-hands, disciplined by the lash, and liable to have their wives or children or relatives sold from them--_as happened on an average once at least in a life_--were all to a man quite ready to forsake "ole massa" and "dear ole missus," and flee unto freedom. And what a vile mean wretch any man must be who would sacrifice his _freedom_ to any other living being, be it for love or feudal fidelity--and what a villain must the man be who would accept such a gift! I had never thought much of this subject before I left home. I did not _like_ slavery, nor to think about it. But in Europe I did like such thought, and I returned fully impressed with the belief that slavery was, as Charles Sumner said, "the sum of all crimes." In which summation he showed himself indeed a "sumner," as it was called of yore. Which cost me many a bitter hour and much sorrow, for there was hardly a soul whom I knew, except my mother, to whom an Abolitionist was not simply the same thing as a disgraceful, discreditable malefactor. Even my father, when angry with me one day, could think of nothing bitterer than to tell me that I knew I was _an Abolitionist_. I kept it to myself, but the reader can have no idea of what I was made to suffer for years in Philadelphia, where everything Southern was exalted and worshipped with a baseness below that of the blacks themselves. For all of which in after years I had full and complete recompense. I lived to see the young ladies who were ready to kneel before any man who owned "sla-aves," detest the name of "South," and to learn that their fathers and friends were battling to the death to set those slaves free. I lived to see the roof of the "gentlemanly planter," who could not of yore converse a minute with me without letting me know that he considered himself as an immeasurably higher being than myself, blaze over his head amid yell and groan and sabre-stroke-- "And death-shots flying thick and fast,"