his theory, was patriarchal and protective, and in his practice eminently beneficent;—if he were living this day, I doubt not he would be found among its most earnest and confident champions;—but he did not believe in holding human beings in bondage "on principle," as it were, and for the mere sake of bondage. The patriarchal element was, he thought, an essential in the moral right of the system, and that no longer necessary, the system became wrong. Therefore, so soon as it became clear to him that he (so peculiarly had God blessed him) could protect, advise, relieve his servants as effectually, they being free, as if their persons and their poor little goods, their labor and almost their lives, were at his disposal, he set them at liberty without asking the advice, or caring for the opinion, of any man; and by the same instrument which gave them the right to work, think, live, and die for themselves, he imposed upon his children a solemn responsibility for their well-being, in the future as in the past,—the honorable care of seeing to it that their wants were judiciously provided for, their training virtuous, their instruction useful, their employers just, their families united, and their homes happy. Those who were already of age went forth free at once; the minors received their "papers" on their twenty-first birthday. And thus it was that, when I was born, Aunt Judy was as much freer than her "boy" is now, as simple, natural wants are freer than impatient, artificial appetites.
But that was the beginning and the end of Aunt Judy's freedom. For all the change it wrought in her feelings and her ways toward us, or in ours toward her, she might as well have remained the slave and the baby she was born; the old relations, so natural and gentle, of affection and faithful service on her side, of affection and grateful care on ours, no mere legal forms could alter: no papers could disturb their peacefulness, no privileges impair their confidence. Indeed, that same freedom—or at least her personal interest in it—was matter of magnificent contempt to both nurse and child; she understood it too well to pet it, I understood it too little to be jealous of it. It was only by asking her that you could discover that Aunt Judy was free; it was only by being asked that she could recollect it. For her, freedom meant the right to "go where she pleased"; but her love knew no where but my father's roof and her darling's crib, nor anything so wrong as that right. For us, her freedom meant our freedom, the right to send her away when we chose; but our love knew no such when in all the shameful possibilities of time, nor anything in all the cruel conspiracies of ingratitude so wrong as that right. Could we entreat her to leave us, or to return from following after us, when each of our hearts had spoken and said, "The Lord do so to me, and more also, if aught but death part thee and me"? So she and I have gone on together ever since, and shall go on, until we come to the Bethlehem of love at rest. What though she had been there before we started, and were there now? To the saints and their eternal spaceless spirits there are nor days, nor miles, nor starting-points, nor resting-places, nor journey's ends.
From my earliest remembered observation, when I first began to "take notice," as nurses say of vague babies, with pinafore comparison and judgment, Aunt Judy was an old woman; I knew that, because she had explained to me why I had not wrinkles like hers, and why she could not read her precious Bible without spectacles, as I could, and why my back was not bent too, and how if I lived I would grow so. From such instructions I derived a blurred, bewildering notion that from me to her, suffering an Aunt-Judy change, was a long, slow, wearisome process of puckering and dimming and stiffening. But when she told me how she had carried my mother in her arms, as she had carried me, and had made the proud discovery of her first tooth, as, piously exploring among my tender gums with her little finger, she had found mine, I stared at the Pacific of
