and all others who perpetuate this custom, are not, indirectly at least, accessory to, and responsible for, many of those appalling occurrences, which usually terminate in the roasting beforehand, of some brutal wretch, for a nameless outrage on perhaps the wife, sister, or daughter of his own master? That such events occur so rarely, under existing circumstances, is, to me, an unanswerable argument in favor of the wide and irremediable disparity of race; that this barrier is sometimes overleaped, is I believe, owing more than men will like to admit, to the fact that husbands, fathers and brothers, have never once dreamed of placing that among the possible contingencies, that might result from their own mismanagement.

Southerners are not overmuch given, at best, to wasting any superfluous amount of time investigating the nature of cause and effect; and cannot of course be expected to do it now, when their whole souls would revolt from the conclusion, to which I honestly believe it would inevitably lead. Would they do so, I fancy we should soon see very different domestic and dormitorial arrangements; and a less universal habit of "putting on full steam," to make a little more cotton, to buy another negro to make a little more cotton, and so on ad infinitum; just for instance, as your humble servant compresses her lines more and more, on every page she attempts to trace.

I dare say you are asleep, so—

To Morpheus, my dear cousin.

LOUISE.

DEMAND FOR A SONG·

By one who assumed, in sport, to be JENNY LIND; and REPLY.

A SONG for my lute that shall float on its chords,
A measure all glowing with gladness and glee;
A tone gushing out from the heart's sweetest wards,
This, this is my tribute, oh minstrel, from thee.

No fear for the future, no accent of pain,

No care for the present must sadden its tone; Youth, beauty and hope must e'en breathe in its strain, Like birds of bright plumage that upward have

flown.

For my life is still young in its freshness and truth, And I deem that the future will aye be the same; Then weave me a song like the smile of my youth, To float on my lute, down the current of fame.

`Oh No-for I'm old, though the register tells Fewer lusters by far than are traced on my brow; And a voice from the past, ever silently swells

The dirge of the hopes that are withered and low.

Then wake not its tone, for I shrink from the tread

Of those echoless steps that are thronging the stair; The altered, the absent, the distant the dead

They are coming-all coming-and gathering there!

And the sigh of each leaf in the blossom of life,
As the petal was reft and flung to the breeze;
(Like the song of the swan, or the dolphin's last dyes
Appealing in anguish to winds and to seas);

It is moaning for aye in the wierd spirit's wail,
As mem'ry summons each ghost from the crowd
Of shadowless forms, that are strewing the gale
With the damp and the mildew that clings to the
shroud.

And my heart, life and lute all smell of its mold,

No ray of bright promise now cheers me along, And my brow is not all that is careworn and old, For no muse but deep sorrow presides o'er my song. LEONA. Miss., Feb., 1851.

LETTER XIX.

SALMAGUNDI OF GOSSIP AND AUTOBIOGRAPHY.

DEAR DORA:

S- -n, Miss., April, 1851.

You will be surprised, though I trust not disagreeably so, at receiving, for the first time in your life, a line from your long wandering cousin.

I claim no special ovation for the gratuity, for when a culprit is sure to be detected, do what he will, he may as well "confess and be hanged" at once. And it is just possible, that but for circulating the inclosed, I might not have found time to write quite so soon; still

I have always intended doing so, ever since I knew that you too were far away from the home of your youth, and that one after another of your elder sisters had gone down, like nearly all I love, to the silent grave. Ignorance of your address, and the uncertainty of my own have hitherto deterred me; but thanks to uncle J's last, the former difficulty is now obviated— though you may feel no special gratitude therefor— and Clara tells me, you are a wife and mother. A happy one, I hope and trust; though I should not always have inferred it, quite as matter of course, from the fact that you had assumed the name, and with it, I hope, as much as may be, of the feelings of a mother, to several children not literally yours.

There is, I apprehend, something instinctively revolting, if not almost humiliating, in the very name of second wife or step-mother, and the office itself can be no sinecure, particularly here at the South where people are somewhat sensible, and consequently aware, how inadequate is a whole lifetime of self-abnegation and subservience to repair, to their children, the irreparable wrong of having exposed them to the sins and sorrows of this life, and the fearful uncertainties of the next; and it certainly is very hard atoning for injuries one has not committed, yet on the whole, playing la belle mere (how much softer and prettier is this than our coarse English phrase), to whatever number of "young hopefuls" may have the audacity to call any one man "Father," can scarce be worse than enacting stepmother de facto to all the dirty, ugly little wretches in community! And with the comfortable assurance too, as in my case, that by the time one set of the "varmints" has been caught and caged long enough to

be demi-civilized, they will have to be dispersed, and their quondam to pay as dearly for the respite as would Esop's Fox had his benevolent friend, the swallow, persisted in his humane intentions. The stepping may not be perfectly felicitous, especially if it happens, as I suppose it does once in a thousand years or so, to be stepwife as well as mother; but I do begin to think there is something a little ridiculous in the tenacity with which certain old friends of ours adhere to their primitive opinion, that it constitutes the crowning agony of all female martyrdom; my own private opinion ("publicly expressed") being that it consists either in "governessing," or being tied to some miserly, vulgar old fool, or contemptible sot.

Lady Teazle's reply to Sir Peter's taunt respecting her former position, namely: "that she recollected it distinctly, and a very disagreeable one it was," etc., is very apropos-to the general question I mean, not to your particular case, there I trust it may be wholly irrelevant; for you, I hope, never found shooting young ideas half so intolerably irksome as myself.

It is not the mere physical labor and confinement that render it so oppressive, though you in Old Virginia have no idea what a constitution of iron it requires even for that, here in the South-west; nor what uncommon effort and ability it demands to maintain the least ascendency over the minds of pupils, where one half the parents are much like the aggrieved father, who had "been sending to school and paying out his money for three whole years, to have his son learn Latin, and now, he couldn't even do a sum in Simple Interest!" They, of course, are quite as apt to find fault when their children do well as when they do ill, a majority of the balance