Page:Aunt Phillis's Cabin.djvu/78

 "'You got some good blood out of her,' said I, 'at any rate,' for Mrs. Brown was wiping her hands, and the blood looked red and healthy enough; 'but she is not a turnip, that's one thing to be considered.'

"'Well, Mrs. Brown, good evening,' said Arthur. 'I shall tell them at the South how you Northern people treat your white niggers.'

"'I wish to the Lord,' said Mrs. Brown, 'we had some real niggers. Here I am sweatin, and workin, and bakin, all these hot days, and Brown he's doin nothin from morning 'till night but reading Abolition papers, and tendin Abolition meetings. I'm not much better than a nigger myself, half the time.'

"Now," said Arthur, "Mr. Hubbard, I have been fortunate in my experience. I have never seen a slave woman struck in my life, though I've no doubt such things are done; and I assure you when I saw Mrs. Brown run the risk of spoiling that pretty face for life, I wondered your laws did not protect 'these bound gals,' or 'white niggers,' as she calls them."

"You see, Hubbard," said Abel, "your philanthropy and Arthur's is very contracted. He only feels sympathy for a pretty white face, you for a black one, while my enlarged benevolence induces me to stand up for all female 'phizmahoganies,' especially for the Hottentot and the Madagascar ones, and the fair sex of all the undiscovered islands on the globe in general."

"You don't think, then," said Mr. Hubbard, argumentatively, "that God's curse is on slavery, do you?"

"In what sense?" asked Arthur. "I think that slavery is, and always was a curse, and that the Creator intended what he said, when he first spoke of it, through Noah."

"But, I mean," said Mr. Hubbard, "that it will bring a curse on those who own slaves."

"No, sir," said Arthur, "God's blessing is, and always has been on my father, who is a slaveholder; on his