Although the foregoing is far from being exhaustive, it is enough; it shows incontrovertibly that Mrs. Stowe builded throughout upon the exceptional and imaginary. My father, a Presbyterian clergyman, with the strictest notions as to the Sabbath, as he generally called Sunday, made me read, when a boy, a book called, if I recollect aright, "Edwards's Sabbath Manual." Be the title whatever it may, the entire book was but a collection of instances of secular work done on Sunday, and always followed closely by disaster, which appeared to be divine punishment of sabbath-breaking. The author was confident he had proved his case. He believed with his whole soul that if one should do on Sunday any week-day work not permitted in the catechism, it was more than probable that God would at once deal severely with him for not keeping his day holy. This is a somewhat overstrained example of Mrs. Stowe's method. I will therefore give one which is as close as close can be. Suppose a diligent worker to cull from newspaper files, law reports, and what he hears in talk, the cases in which one party to a marriage has cruelly mistreated the other. If he digested his collection with a view to effect, it would prove a far more formidable attack upon the most civilizing and improving of all human institutions than Mrs. Stowe's Key is upon slavery; and if he had her rare artistic gift he could found upon it a wonderful anti-marriage romance. The author of such a Key and romance would be confuted at once by the exclamation, "If these horrors are general, people would flee marriage as they do the plague." Let it be inquired, "If 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' and Mrs. Stowe's Key truly represent, why did not more of the blacks escape into the free States? and why did they not revolt in large bodies during the war in the many communities whence all the able-bodied whites had gone to the front far away?" and there can be but one answer, which is, there was no general or common oppression of the African in slavery--there were no horrors to him in the condition--but on the contrary he was contented and happy, merry as the day is long. How was it that a book so full of untrue statement and gross exaggeration as to an American theme found such wide acceptance at the north and elsewhere out of the south? For years I could not explain. When I read it at Princeton, I talked it over with the southern students. We pooh-poohed the negroes, but we admired the principal white characters except Mrs. St. Claire, whom we all regarded as a libellous caricature. The representation of slavery was incorrect, and the portrayal of the negro as only a black and kinky-haired white was so absurd that one of us dreamed that either would be taken seriously by the north. It was some ten years after the brothers' war that the true explanation commenced to dawn upon me, and it has at last become clear.