Now as to the means she had of acquiring the facts. Although she had seen a little of Kentucky, a border slave State, she had never lived in it, nor anywhere else in the south. Especially is it to be emphasized that she had had no experience of the cotton region, the real seat of slavery, and the only place where it could be fully studied and learned. She passed some eighteen years in lower Ohio, just across the river from Kentucky, where she saw much of escaping slaves. Of course, being aflame with zeal as she was for her subject, she had observed closely the native negroes of the north. Such of these as she met were widely different from the mass in slavery; for, born and bred in the north, they had had the beneficent training of the free-labor system, and also opportunity to absorb considerable of a higher culture. These negroes were exceptional, even of the northern natives. And the fugitives were also exceptional; for they far excelled the companions left behind them in intelligence, spirit, and every essential of good character. An ordinary Cuffee had liberty the least of all things in his thoughts. A negro like Hector or Garrison, the former escaping from Calhoun and the other from Toombs, was as much above the average as the shepherd dog is above common sheep-worriers and egg-suckers. Mrs. Stowe, as her book shows, had no conception whatever of the ordinary plantation negro. And while she had seen much of some Kentuckians, these were not representative southerners. They lived upon the border, where slave labor found but little lucrative opportunity, and they were also affected more or less with the sentiments of their nearby northern neighbors. Naturally only those Kentuckians of the border who really were of her opinion would consort with this decided anti-slavery partisan; the others would stand aloof. Mrs. Stowe never knew either real negroes or real slaveholders. And she also knew nothing whatever of cotton plantation management. Some authors show an amazingly full and accurate knowledge of countries and communities which they never saw. Burke's knowledge of every detail touching India occurs to me. Lieber had visited Greece while Niebuhr had not. When the former had minutely described to the other some famous landscape,--say the battlefield of Marathon,--Niebuhr would make copious inquiries about remains of old roads and belongings which the other had forgotten, although he had seen them. Tom Moore had never been in Persia, but there is so much of that country drawn to the life in Lalla Rookh that somebody applied to him the saying that reading D'Herbelot was as good as riding on the back of a camel. Mrs. Stowe could not collect, sift, and read facts, and see through the most cunningly devised masks, as Henry D. Lloyd showed his marvellous power to do in "Wealth against Commonwealth." That was not her gift. Her gift was to tell the best of stories--to vary it prodigally and artistically