I also saw a
peculiarity of the whortleberry's flower, which, when stung by an insect
sometimes swells to twenty-five times its natural size, and becomes a
fungus.'
"'Now,' said I, 'why not apply this,--perhaps you were intending to do
so,--and say that society at the North is generally like our
whortleberry pastures in autumn, which pleased you so much, with here
and there a fungus, made by the sting of radicalism.'
"A planter's Northern wife said, 'I should like to move the adoption of
that simile.'
"'We will have it so,' said the Judge to me, 'if the lady and you tell
us that we must.'
"'A fungus,' said I, 'gets more attention from one half of the people
who go into the woods, than all the pure and beautiful garniture of the
pastures.'
"The ladies of our company having been rallied for not having done their
part in the conversation, and also, of course, having been complimented
for keeping silence so long, the wife of one of the planters, a Northern
lady, made this remark that considering how God, in his providence, had
made such provision for the welfare of the human family through slavery
in our land, and, in doing it, had shown mercy and salvation to so many
hundreds of thousands of Africans, she thought it both ungrateful and
narrow-minded in people anywhere to confine all their thoughts to the
incidental evils of the slaves.
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