"Oh, I tell you, Miss Anne, you can't do it. You don't know the passion in human nature for anything that is forbidden. Now, I believe it's more that than love of reading. You can't shut up such an experiment as you are making here. It's just like a fire. It will blaze; it will catch on all the plantations round; and I assure you it's matter of life and death with us. You smile, Miss Anne, but it's so."
"Really, my dear Mr. Bradshaw, you could not have addressed me on a more unpleasant subject. I am sorry to excite the apprehension of our neighbors; but"—
"Give me leave to remind you, also, Miss Anne, that the teaching of slaves to read and write is an offence to which a severe penalty is attached by the laws."
"I thought," said Anne, "that such barbarous laws were a dead letter in a Christian community, and that the best tribute I could pay to its Christianity was practically to disregard them."
"By no means, Miss Anne, by no means! Why, look at us here in South Carolina. The negroes are three to one over the whites now. Will it do to give them the further advantages of education and facilities of communication? You see, at once, it will not. Now, well-bred people, of course, are extremely averse to mingling in the affairs of other families; and had you merely taught a few favorites, in a private way, as I believe people now and then do, it wouldn't have seemed so bad; but to have regular provision for teaching school, and school-hours,—I think, Miss Anne, you'll find it will result in unpleasant consequences."
"Yes, I fancy," said Anne, raising herself up, and slightly coloring, "that I see myself in the penitentiary for the sin and crime of teaching children to read! I think, Mr. Bradshaw, it is time such laws were disregarded. Is not that the only way in which many laws are repealed? Society outgrows them, people disregard them, and so they fall away, like the calyx from some of my flowers. Come, now, Mr. Bradshaw, come with me to my school. I'm going to call it together," said Anne, rising, and beginning to go down the veranda steps. "Certainly, my dear friend, you ought not to judge without seeing. Wait a moment, till I call Miss Gordon."
And Anne stepped across the shady parlor, and in a few moments reappeared with Nina, both arrayed in white cape-bonnets. They crossed to the right of the house, to a small cluster of neat cottages, each one of which had its little vegetable garden, and its plot in front, carefully tended, with flowers. They passed onward into a grove of magnolias which skirted the back of the house, till they came to a little building, with the external appearance of a small Grecian temple the pillars of which were festooned with jessamine.
"Pray what pretty little place is this?" said Mr. Bradshaw.
"This is my school-room," said Anne.
Mr. Bradshaw repressed a whistle of astonishment; but the emotion was plainly legible in his face, and Anne said, laughing,—