"Oh! oh! the beautiful reason for defending organized barbarism! Suppose I had had the misfortune of being born in the Isle of Pines; would you have me therefore be the apologist of piracy? I do hope that I am perfectly free from the prejudices and trammels of geographical morality. My body was born amidst slavery, but my conscience soon found the underground railroad. I am not boasting; at least I hope not. I have had no plantations, no patrimony of human flesh; very few temptations, in short, to bow down to the divinity of Ashantee. I sincerely thank Heaven for these three things, that I never owned a slave, that I was educated at the north, and that I have been able to visit the free civilization of Europe." "But why did you live in Louisiana if it was such a Sodom, papa?" "Ah! there you have me. Perhaps it was because I had an expensive daughter to support, and could pick up four or five thousand dollars a year there easier than anywhere else. But you see I am suffering for having given my countenance to sin. I have escaped out of the burning city, like Lot, with only my family. It is my daily wonder, Lillie, that you are not turned into a pillar of salt. The only reason probably is that the age of miracles is over." "Papa, when I am as old as you are, and you are as young as I am, I'll satirize you dreadfully.--Well, if we are going to live in New Boston, why can't we keep house?" "It costs more for two people to keep house than to board. Our furniture, rent, food, fuel, lights and servants would come to more than the eighteen dollars a week which we pay here, now that we have given up our parlor. In a civilized country elbow-room is expensive." "But is it exactly nice to stay forever in a hotel? English travellers make such an outcry about American families living in hotels." "I know. At the bottom it is bad. But it is a sad necessity of American society. So long as we have untrained servants--black barbarians at the South and mutinous foreigners at the North--many American housekeepers will throw down their keys in despair and rush for refuge to the hotels. And numbers produce respectability, at least in a democracy." "So we must give up the idea of a nice little house all to ourselves." "I am afraid so, unless I should happen to find diamonds in the basaltic formation of the Eagle's Nest." The Doctor falls to his writing, and Miss Ravenel to her embroidery. Presently the young lady, without having anything in particular to say, is conscious of a desire for further conversation, and, after searching for a subject, begins as follows. "Papa, have you been in the parlor this morning?" "Yes, my dear," answers papa, scratching away desperately with his old-fashioned quill pen. "Whom did you see there?" "See?--Where?--Oh, I saw Mr. Andrew Smith," says the Doctor, at first absent-minded, then looking a little quizzical. "What did he have to say?" "Why, my dear, he spoke so low that I couldn't hear what he said."