orked openly and hard for it until
1832. Then came the Nat Turner Insurrection, when they killed all those
women and children, and then rose the hell-fire-for-all, bitter-'n-gall
Abolition people stirring gunpowder with a lighted stick, holding on
like grim death and in perfect safety fifteen hundred miles from where
the explosion was due! And as they denounce without thinking, so a lot
of men have risen with us to advocate without thinking. And underneath
all the clamour, there goes on, all the time, quiet and steady, a
freeing of negroes by deed and will, a settling them in communities in
free States, a belonging to and supporting Colonization Societies. There
are now forty thousand free negroes in Virginia, and Heaven knows how
many have been freed and established elsewhere! It is our best people
who make these wills, freeing their slaves, and in Virginia, at least,
everybody, sooner or later, follows the best people. 'Gradual
manumission, Mr. Green,' that's what Colonel Anderson said, 'with
colonization in Africa if possible. The difficulties are enough to turn
a man's hair grey, but,' said he, 'slavery's knell has struck, and we'll
put an end to it in Virginia peacefully and with some approach to
wisdom--if only they'll stop stirring the gunpowder!'"

The miller raised his large head, with its effect of white powder from
the mill, and regarded the landscape. "'We're all mighty blind, poor
creatures,' as the preacher says, but I reckon one day we'll find the
right way, both for us and for that half million poor, dark-skinned,
lovable, never-knew-any-better, pretty-happy-on-the-whole,
way-behind-the-world people that King James and King Charles and King
George saddled us with, not much to their betterment and to our certain
hurt. I reckon we'll find it. But I'm damned if I'm going to take the
North's word for it that she has the way! Her old way was to sell her
negroes South."

"I've thought and thought," said Allan. "People mean well, and yet
there's such a dreadful lot of tragedy in the world!"

"I agree with you there," quoth the miller. "And I certainly don't deny
that slavery's responsible for a lot of bitter talk and a lot of
red-hot feeling; for some suffering to some negroes, too, and for a deal
of harm to almost all whites. And I, for one, will be powerful glad when
every negro, man and woman, is free. They can never really grow until
they are free--I'll acknowledge that. And if they want to go back to
th