The housekeeper staggered back against the
wall of the passage. The coachman and the servant
put her into a chair. Her face was livid,
and her teeth chattered in her head.

"Send for my brother's doctor," she said, as
soon as she could speak.

The doctor came in. She handed him a letter,
before he could say a word.

"Did you write that letter?"

He looked it over rapidly, and answered her
without hesitation,

"Certainly not!"

"It is your handwriting."

"It is a forgery of my handwriting."

She rose from the chair, with a new strength
in her.

"When does the return mail start for Paris?"
she asked.

"In half an hour,"

"Send instantly, and take me a place in it!"

The servant hesitated; the doctor protested.
She turned a deaf ear to them both.

"Send!" she reiterated, "or I will go myself."

They obeyed. The servant went to take the
place: the doctor remained, and held a conversation
with Mrs. Lecount. When the half-hour
had passed, he helped her into her place in the
mail, and charged the conductor privately to take
care of his passenger.

"She has travelled from England without
stopping," said the doctor; " and she is travelling
back again without rest. Be careful of her, or
she will break down under the double journey."

The mail started. Before the first hour of the
new day was at an end, Mrs. Lecount was on
her way back to England.

THE END OF THE FOURTH SCENE.

BLIND BLACK TOM.

[WE have received the following remarkable
account from a valued friend in Boston,
Massachusetts. It will be published in that city,
within a few days after its present publication
in these pages.]

Sometime in the year 1850, a tobacco-planter
in Southern Georgia (Perry H. Oliver is his
name) bought a likely negro woman with some
other field-hands. She was stout, tough-muscled,
willing, promised to be a remunerative servant;
her baby, however, a boy a few months old, was
only thrown in as a make-weight to the bargain,
or rather, because Mr. Oliver would not consent
to separate mother and child. Charity only
could have induced him to take the picaninny,
in fact, for he was but a lump of black flesh
born blind, and with the vacant grin of idiocy,
they thought, already stamped on his face. The
two slaves were purchased, I believe, from a
trader: it has been impossible, therefore, for
me to ascertain where Tom was born, or when.
Georgia field-hands are not accurate as Jews in
preserving their genealogy; they do not anticipate
a Messiah. A white man, you know, has
that vague hope unconsciously latent in him that
he is, or shall give birth to the great man of his
race, a helper, a provider for the world's hunger:
so he grows jealous with his blood; the dead
grandfather may have presaged the possible son;
besides, it is a debt he owes to this coming Saul
to tell him whence he came. There are some
classes, free and slave, out of whom society has
crushed this hope: they have no clan, no family
names among them, therefore. This idiot boy,
chosen by God to be anointed with the holy
chrism, is only " Tom" " Blind Tom," they
call him in all the Southern States, with a kind
cadence always, being proud and fond of him,
and yet nothing but Tom? That is pitiful.
Just a mushroom growth unkinned, unexpected,
not hoped for, for generations, owning
no name to purify and honour and give away
when he is dead. His mother, at work today
in the Oliver plantations, can never comprehend
why her boy is famous; this gift of God to him
means nothing to her. Nothing to him, either,
which is saddest of all; he is unconscious, wears
his crown as an idiot might. Whose fault is
that? Deeper than slavery the evil lies.

Mr. Oliver did his duty well to the boy, being
an observant and thoroughly kind master. The
plantation was large, heartsome, faced the sun,
swarmed with little black urchins, with plenty
to eat, and nothing to do.

All that Tom required, as he fattened out of
baby into boyhood, was room in which to be
warm, on the grass patch, or by the kitchen fires,
to be stupid, flabby, sleepy, kicked and petted
alternately by the other hands. He had a habit
of crawling up on the porches and verandahs of
the mansion, and squatting there in the sun,
waiting for a kind word or touch from those who
went in and out. He seldom failed to receive it.
Southerners know nothing of the physical shiver
of aversion with which even some Abolitionists
of the North touch the negro: so Tom, through
his very helplessness, came to be a sort of pet
in the family, a playmate, occasionally, of Mr.
Oliver's own infant children. The boy, creeping
about day after day in the hot light, was as repugnant
an object as the lizards in the neighbouring
swamp, and promised to be of as little
use to his master. He was of the lowest negro
type, from which only field-hands can be made,
coal-black, with protruding heels, the ape-jaw,
blubber-lips constantly open, the sightless eyes
closed, and the head thrown far back on the
shoulders, lying on the back, in fact, a habit
which he still retains, and which adds to the imbecile
character of the face. Until he was seven
years of age, Tom was regarded on the plantation
as an idiot, not unjustly; for at the present
time his judgment and reason rank but as that of
a child four years old. He showed a dog-like
affection for some members of the household—
a son of Mr. Oliver's especially—and a keen,
nervous sensitiveness to the slightest blame or
praise from them,—possessed, too, a low, animal
irritability of temper, giving way to inarticulate
yelps of passion when provoked. That is all, so
far; we find no other outgrowth of intellect or