n cracked in many
places, and the inflamed flesh was sloughing off in great flakes.
The frost-bitten flesh extended to his knees, the joints of which
were terribly inflamed. The right one had already begun suppurating.
This poor little black boy, covered with nothing but a cotton shirt,
drilling pants, a pair of nearly worn out brogans and a battered
old hat, on the morning of December 30th, the coldest day of the
season, when the mercury was seventeen degrees below zero, in the
face of a driving snow storm, was sent half a mile from home to
protect his master's unshucked corn from the depredations of
marauding cows and crows. He remained standing around in the snow
until four o'clock, then he drove the cows home, received a piece
of cold corn pone, and was sent out in the snow again to chop stove
wood till dark. Having no bed, he slept that night in front of
the fireplace, with his frozen feet buried in the ashes. Dr. C.
H. Richards found it necessary to cut off the boy's feet as far
back as the ankle and the instep."

This was but one case in several. Personally, I have no doubt that
Mr. Reuben Taylor entirely agrees with Chief Justice Comegys on
the great question of blasphemy, and probably nothing would so
gratify Mr. Reuben Taylor as to see some man in a Delaware jail
for the crime of having expressed an honest thought. No wonder
that in the State of Delaware the Christ of intellectual liberty
has been crucified between the pillory and the whipping-post. Of
course I know that there are thousands of most excellent people in
that State--people who believe in intellectual liberty, and who
only need a little help--and I am doing what I can in that direction
--to repeal the laws that now disgrace the statute book of that
little commonwealth. I have seen many people from that State lately
who really wish that Colonel Hazelitt had never died.

_Question_. What has the press generally said with regard to the
action of Judge Comegys? Do they, so far as you know, justify his
charge?

_Answer_. A great many papers having articles upon the subject
have been sent to me. A few of the religious papers seem to think
that the Judge did the best he knew, and there is one secular paper
called the _Evening News_, published at Chester, Pa., that thinks
"that the rebuke from so high a source of authority will have a
most excellent effect, and will check religious blasphemers from
parading their immoral creeds before the