Page:The Homes of the New World- Vol. II.djvu/460

Rh of seriousness and gentleness as himself. Both husband and wife appear to be sincerely attached to each other. Why should such people be slave-owners? or rather, why could not all slave-owners be such people?

The planter's wife told me that her husband never was able to enjoy real peace of mind on the plantations, for that the thought of his slaves, and the wish to do them justice and to treat them well, disturbed him day and night; he was always afraid of not doing enough for them.

We are now near Wicksburg, a city of bad reputation on the Mississippi, but a city also which shows the ability of the North Americans for self-government. A few years since a band of desperate gamblers and adventurers settled themselves down there. They set up a gambling-club and decoyed young men thither; purposely excited quarrels, and fought with pistols in the streets, and even in houses, and committed every kind of outrage. The wise men of the city assembled and announced to the gamblers that they must either vacate the city within eight days or that they would be seized and hanged. The gamblers treated the announcement with scorn, and gambled and quarrelled, and had their pistol-fights as before. When the eight days of grace were past, the friends of order in the city assembled, seized them, and hanged the one who was the worst of the set, and then putting the rest in a boat, they turned them adrift on the Mississippi. Such summary treatment is called Lynch-law, and is the self-assumed administration of law, by a sense of justice, where there exists no ordinary executive power able to administer the law, according to its usual forms. After this execution, which I believe occurred last year, Wicksburg became a creditable place.

We shall soon leave the region of cotton for that of sugar. But when shall we arrive at the region of summer? It is constantly cold and cheerless.