y to his wife.

"Nowhere," said I, "do we see this more conspicuously than in Southern
society. Chivalry there seems to blend with the genial influences of
Christianity, and together they give a tone and manner to Southern life
which is peculiar.

"I am often struck with a Southern gentleman's reverence, here at the
North, for the female sex. He is displeased at seeing daughters serving
at table in boarding-houses kept by their worthy parents or widowed
mothers. We, indeed, respect a young woman who serves us in this manner,
(if we reflect at all,) and we resent rudeness or an unfeeling mode of
addressing those who are in such situations. But the Southern gentleman
goes further. He has, perhaps, not been accustomed to see the daughter
of a white family serve. When a respectable young woman, therefore, at a
boarding-house, brings him his tea, he feels impelled to rise and ask
her to be seated, and to wait upon her. I have been an eye-witness to
scenes of this kind, and have been much pleased and not a little amused
at some exhibitions of the feeling. If our sentiments toward the sex,
and their position in social life, mark the degree of civilization and
cultivation in a community, I am compelled to accord a high degree of it
to Southern society, in its best estate.

"This is one effect of slavery. It takes mothers, wives, daughters, away
from occupations which, though honorable, do not always elevate them in
the eyes of the other sex. Perhaps there is no value (and some will say
it) in all this; that every labor and service is right and good for
woman; and that we are to prefer a state of society where woman does
these things with her own hands, instead of having them done for her,
and that this is our only safeguard against luxury and degeneracy. I
will not debate it. I am only showing that, tried by an ordinary
test,--the position of woman,--Southerners are really not barbarians."

"I verily believe," said Mrs. North, "that if you take the Southern
constitution and give it a Northern training, the result is as perfect a
specimen of man or woman as is to be found on earth."

"People at the North," said I, "may, in their zeal against slavery, make
light of the abounding sustenance which the slaves enjoy, and call it a
low and gross thing in comparison with 'freedom;' but, in the view of
all political economists and publicists, how to feed the lower classes
is a great problem. It is solved in slavery.

"There is ano