"In short," said Jennie, "according to your showing, the whole country is going to destruction. Now, if things really are so bad, if you really believe all you have been saying, you ought not to be sitting drinking your tea as you are now, or to have spent the afternoon playing croquet with us girls; you ought to gird yourself with sackcloth, and go up and down the land, raising the alarm, and saying, 'Yet forty days and Nineveh shall be overthrown.'" "Well," said Theophilus, while a covert smile played about his lips, "you know the saying, 'Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow,' etc. Things are not yet _gone_ to destruction, only _going_,--and why not have a good time on deck before the ship goes to pieces? Your chimney-corner is a tranquil island in the ocean of trouble, and your muffins are absolutely perfect. I'll take another, if you'll please to pass them." "I've a great mind _not_ to pass them," said Jennie. "Are you in earnest in what you are saying or are you only saying it for sensation? How _can_ people believe such things and be comfortable? _I_ could not. If I believed all you have been saying, I could not sleep nights,--I should be perfectly miserable; and _you_ cannot really believe all this, or you would be." "My dear child," said Mrs. Crowfield, "our friend's picture is the truth painted with all its shadows and none of its lights. All the dangers he speaks of are real and great, but he omits the counterbalancing good. Let _me_ speak now. There never has been a time in our history when so many honest and just men held power in our land as now,--never a government before in which the public councils recognized with more respect the just and the right. There never was an instance of a powerful government showing more tenderness in the protection of a weak and defenceless race than ours has shown in the care of the freedmen hitherto. There never was a case in which the people of a country were more willing to give money and time and disinterested labor to raise and educate those who have thus been thrown on their care. Considering that we have had a great, harassing, and expensive war on our hands, I think the amount done by Government and individuals for the freedmen unequalled in the history of nations; and I do not know why it should be predicted from this past fact, that, in the future, both Government and people are about to throw them to the lions, as Mr. Theophilus supposes. Let us wait, at least, and see. So long as Government maintains a freedmen's bureau, administered by men of such high moral character, we must think, at all events, that there are strong indications in the right direction. Just think of the immense advance of public opinion within four years, and of the grand successive steps of this advance,--Emancipation in the District of Columbia, the Repeal of the Fugitive-Slave Law, the General Emancipation Act, the Amendment of the Constitution. All these do not look as if the black were about to be