He went down to the grave the owner of many hundred slaves, the husband of a fair young bride, and the father of two children, one the only son of his pretty Northern bride, the other the son of his mother’s maid. And what made matters still more complicated and hard to understand, to this unowned, despised son had descended all the bright wit and philosophical mind, and suave, gentle, courteous manners of this fine gentleman Gen. Seybert; and to the son and legal heir of all his wealth, not a bit of his father’s sense, bright mind, and good manners. One of his maternal great-uncles had been a rich, new-made man of low tastes and swaggerin’, aggressive manners. It wuz a sad thing that these inherited traits and tastes should just bound over one gentlemanly generation and swoop down upon the downy, lace-festooned cradle of this only son and heir—but they did. All the nobility of mind, the grace, the kindly consideration for others, and the manly beauty, all fell as a dower to the little lonely baby smuggled away like an accursed thing, in his maternal grandmother’s little whitewashed cabin. To the young heir, Reginald, fell some hundreds of thousands of dollars, two or three plantations, and an honored name and place in society, the tastes of a pot-boy, the mind and habits of a clown, the swaggerin’, boastin’ cruelty of an American Nero. Col. Seybert drove and swore, and threatened his negroes as his great-uncle Wiggins drove the white operatives in his big Northern factory, kept them at starvation wages, and piled up his money-bags over the prostrate forms of gaunt, overworked men and women, and old young children, who earned his money out of their own hopeless youth; with one hand dropped gold into his coffers, and with the other dug shallow graves that they filled too soon. Northern cupidity and avarice, Southern avarice and cupidity, equally ugly in God’s sight, so we believe. It wuz indeed strange that to Reginald should descend all the great-uncle’s traits and none of his father’s, only the passionate impulses that marred an otherwise almost faultless character; and to Victor, the cast-off, ignored son, should descend all the courtly graces inherited from a long line of illustrious ancestors, and all the brilliant qualities of mind too that made old Gen. Seybert’s name respected and admired wherever known. His sin in regard to Victor’s mother wuz a sin directly traceable to the influence of Slavery. As the deeds a man commits when in liquor can be followed back to that source, so could this cryin’ sin be traced directly back to the Slave regime. It wuz but one berry off of the poisonous Upas-tree of Slavery that gloomily shadowed the beautiful South land, and darkens it yet, Heaven knows.