most fashionable and aristocratic (these are two words in great
use), instead of asking you in what place you were born, inquire where
you 'hail from.' ! !

"Lord Ashburton arrived at Annapolis t'other day, after a voyage of
forty odd days in heavy weather. Straightway the newspapers state, on
the authority of a correspondent who 'rowed round the ship' (I leave you
to fancy her condition), that America need fear no superiority from
England, in respect of her wooden walls. The same correspondent is
'quite pleased' with the frank manner of the English officers; and
patronizes them as being, for John Bulls, quite refined. My face, like
Haji Baba's, turns upside down, and my liver is changed to water, when I
come upon such things, and think who writes and who read them. . . .

"They won't let me alone about slavery. A certain judge in St. Louis
went so far yesterday that I fell upon him (to the indescribable horror
of the man who brought him) and told him a piece of my mind. I said that
I was very averse to speaking on the subject here, and always forbore,
if possible; but when he pitied our national ignorance of the truths of
slavery, I must remind him that we went upon indisputable records,
obtained after many years of careful investigation, and at all sorts of
self-sacrifice, and that I believed we were much more competent to judge
of its atrocity and horror than he who had been brought up in the midst
of it. I told him that I could sympathize with men who admitted it to be
a dreadful evil, but frankly confessed their inability to devise a means
of getting rid of it; but that men who spoke of it as a blessing, as a
matter of course, as a state of things to be desired, were out of the
pale of reason; and that for them to speak of ignorance or prejudice was
an absurdity too ridiculous to be combated. . . .

"It is not six years ago, since a slave in this very same St. Louis,
being arrested (I forget for what), and knowing he had no chance of a
fair trial, be his offense what it might, drew his bowie-knife and
ripped the constable across the body. A scuffle ensuing, the desperate
negro stabbed two others with the same weapon. The mob who gathered
round (among whom were men of mark, wealth, and influence in the place)
overpowered him by numbers; carried him away to a piece of open ground
beyond the city; _and burned him alive_. This, I say, was done within
six years, in broad day; in a city with its courts, lawyers, tipstaf