Page:Orange Grove.djvu/414

 She saw him once at her own request, but not to taunt him with reproaches. She told him that although he had forfeited all reverence as a husband she wished him no ill, and while she should not seek to lessen her children's respect for him as their father, she could not teach them to cherish his memory by perpetuating his name as a household word, which would henceforth never escape her lips either in their presence or in the presence of others.

Had he not lost every spark of manhood, which in his younger days was at times sufficient to overpower his sensuality with something like the pure gush of feeling, he would have shown some emotion, but he was as unmoved as a statue. Even the affection ho had once manifested for his children seemed to have died out of his bosom.

He departed to seek a more congenial home at the south, the more willingly that a prospect opened before him to retrieve his fallen fortunes, having quite a stock in trade in the way of information concerning several fugitives from different parts of the south, whose former masters he had known, which he kept properly booked. This proved a most invaluable acquisition to his credentials for admission again to southern society, a path that might have been rather difficult of access after his precipitate retreat.

The old slave law of '93, though sufficiently stringent in its provisions, had never been very effectual in securing the end for which it was enacted, owing to the prejudices still lingering in the northern mind against the anti-republican theory that only white men were created free and equal. The southern