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 52 to the sensibility of the people in that State, this agent Massachusetts next declined to render this simple service.

Owing

selected one of her

own

sons, a venerable citizen,

who had

already served with honor in the other House of Congress, and who was of admitted eminence as a lawyer, the Hon. Samuel

Hoar, of Concord, to visit Charleston, and to do what the agent This excellent gentlefirst appointed had shrunk from doing. in manners as he gentle him, knew who all man, beloved by

was firm in

character,

and with a countenance that was in itself at Charleston, accompanied all South-Carolina was con-

a letter of recommendation, arrived only by his daughter. Straightway

According to a story in Boswell's Johnson, all the inhabitants at St. Kilda, a remote island of the Hebrides, on the approach of a stranger, " catch cold ;" but in South-Carolina it

vulsed.

a fever that they " catch." The Governor at the time, who was none other than one of her present Senators, [Mr. Ham-

is

mond,] made his arrival the subject of a special message to the the Legislature all Legislature, which I now have before me "caught" the fever, and swiftly adopted resolutions calling upon " his Excellency the Governor to expel from its territory the said agent, after due notice to depart," and promising " to sustain the Executive authority in any measures it may adopt for

the purposes aforesaid."

Meanwhile the fever raged in Charleston. The agent of Massachusetts was first accosted in the streets by a person unthe known to him, who, flourishing a bludgeon in his hand question is in Slavery where itself shows always bludgeon " You had better be traveling, and the sooner the cried out better for you, I can tell you; if you stay here until to-morrow morning, you will feel something you will not like, I'm thinkNext came threats of an attack during the following ing." night on the hotel in which he was lodged then a request from

—

—





the landlord that he should quit, in order to preserve the hotel then a itself from the impending danger of an infuriated mob

committee of Slave-masters,

him

to the boat.

Thus

who

politely proposed to conduct

arrested in his simple errand of good-

—

venerable public servant, whose appearance alone like that of the " grave and pious man" mentioned by Virgil would have softened any mob not inspired by Slavery, yieldwill, this

ed to the ejectment proposed

— precisely as the prisoner yields