A friend of mine, on the —— day of ——, 18—, (the dates it is unnecessary to specify,) became the owner of a man. He had never owned one before; and he has had so much trouble with him, that I doubt if he will ever allow himself to become owner of one again. My friend is not a Southerner; yet the circumstances by which so singular a dispensation fell to him, it is unnecessary for me to recount. I will briefly describe the master and the man, and show how they succeeded in their relationship.

The master was wholly respectable in his life and character; endowed with good sense; well enough off in the world, able to hire service, if he needed, and to pay for it: his temper not bad, though sometimes irritable;—he could be provoked as others can. He had strong passions, and sometimes in the course of his life they had got the better of him, and had led him to conduct which, in the coolness of his mind, he bitterly repented. Circumstances might have made a bad man of him. The instructions which he received in his childhood, the example of his parents, the respectable neighbourhood in which he resided, the church which he attended, all had a favourable influence upon him. So he became a man of principle. He had not, indeed, the highest principles; he was no hero; he was not disposed to make himself a martyr. His religion was no other than the common religion of the church to which he was attached, and it demanded no peculiar sacrifice of him. He was a member of one of the leading political parties, and did his full duty in maintaining its cause. He called himself a patriot, however, not a partizan; and talked ever of his country, as the highest exemplification of the great principles of liberty, and considered the success of our institutions as the hope of humanity. Yet he loved his country,—not his race. He was not without charity to the poor; and was not unwilling to see them, individually, rising above destitution. Yet he did not like to associate with men lower in the social scale than himself; but had an ambition that impelled him to court the society of those whose station and influence were superior to his own. Nor did he care for, or believe in, any suggestions or plans, the object of which was the elevation of the poor as a class, and the levelling upwards of the human race. He thought that as a divine authority has declared to us, “ye have the poor with you always,” it was ordained that we should always have them,—that they were an exceedingly useful class, as a foundation in society, that the prosperous men of the world could not do without them, and that it was not best to give them too much hope of rising.

Perhaps you will say I have given you no very definite description of him. You will think, perhaps, were I called to write of him again, I might, at once, better make use of the words of the poet,—

I fear, however, that I shall be unable to be more particular in my description of the servant. It is said, “like master, like man,” and, indeed, leaving out the expressions above, which show the relationship of the master to the community and the church, the description of temper, and of general, moral, and religious principle, would answer to be repeated now. Suffice it to say, the man was not bad; that is, not thoroughly bad. He cherished no secret desire for liberty. His master had no real fear of his attempting to escape. He loved his master; and some thought, who did not wholly know him, that never slave loved a master with more fondness and devotion. Yet I know that he was often disobedient. Passages,—not of arms,—but of ill-temper, of reproach, and of insolence, not unfrequently occurred between them. High words were used, hard looks and moody oftener still, perhaps, yet the master never struck his servant, nor did the servant ever offer violence towards his master. But at times they would have been very glad to part company, if the one could have easily escaped, or the other could have made out to do without him. Much of the disobedience which gave serious offence to the master, was the result of inadvertence. Lessons, the most frequently enjoined, were forgotten; they were not always listened to with an obedient mind. Years long the master required this or that service from day to day, and yet the command was not once a year, I may say, attended to. Always the master was saying,—“to-morrow I shall turn over a new leaf with him;” but he had not energy enough to carry his purpose into effect. He intended to give his servant at least some moral education, to teach him self-control, to prevent his bursts of passion, not by the infliction of punishment, but by a true moral discipline; yet the work was always delayed, and never accomplished. You will say, the master had himself some idle fancies that he ought not to have indulged, and that a severer course would have been more successful. But he was one of those who doubt the advantages and shrink from the application of severity, and he would have been no more prompt and resolute and persevering with his servant than with himself.

At the commencement, I seemed to promise a story. But all my narrative is closed with a word more. The master was at the age of twenty-one, when he came into possession of his man. The connection will never be dissolved, except, at least, by death. Indeed, reader, if you have not already seen it, master and man were but one and the same person.

And this is the moral of my little fiction. Who will believe that any man ought to have the ownership of another, when it is so rare to find one of us wholly competent to govern and to own himself? Nay, the better a man is, and the more qualified to direct and to govern others with absolute sway, the less is he willing to take the responsibility of the disposal of them,—but seeing his own unfitness for the office of lord, even of himself, he prays, not that he may be a master of others, but himself a servant of God.