Page:Forty years of it (IA fortyyearsofit00whitiala).pdf/289

 the felicity to employ it first in its present relation. I remember that long years ago, when as a boy I used to frequent the gallery of the theater, I sat rapt afar in the mystery and romance of life on the Mississippi while gazing on the scenes of Bartley Campbell's melodrama "The White Slave." I can call back now, with only a little effort of the imagination and the will, that wonderful pageant—the Natchez, the Robert E. Lee, the great steamboats I knew so well from Mark Twain's book, the plantation hands, the darkies singing on the levee, the moonlight and the jasmine flower—and there was no David Belasco in those days to set the scene either, nor, for the imagination of youth, any need of one! And then the beautiful octoroon, so lily white and fragile that it should have been patent to all, save perhaps an immoral slave-holder, from the very first scene, that she had no drop of negro blood! And the handsome and cruel owner and master, with his slouch hat and top boots, and fierce mustache and imperial, taking her to her awful fate down the river! It was an old story Bartley Campbell used for his plot, a story which had for me an added interest, because my grandfather had told it to me out of his own southern experiences, in those far-off days when he had business that took him down the river to New Orleans. And it was a story which, for a while, in many variants of its original form, was told all over the land to illustrate the immorality of slavery. I suspect that it was not altogether true in its dramatic details; surely no such number of lovely and innocent creatures were permitted to