"The whole fact is this Joe, I am in an awkward fix. I have got myself into a scrape, and I want you to help me out of it. You were good at such things when we were at College, and I want you to try your hand again."

"Well, what's the difficulty now?"

"Well, it is rather a serious one. I have got a child on my hands, and I don't know what to do with it."

"Whose child is it?"

"Now, that's just where the difficulty lies. It is the child of one of my girls, but it looks so much like me, that my wife don't want it on the place. I am too hard up just now to take the child and her mother, North, and take care of them there. And to tell you the truth I am too humane to have the child sold here as a slave. Now in a word do you think that among your Abolitionist friends in the North you could find any one who would raise the child and bring it up like a white child."

"I don't know about that St. Pierre. There are a number of our people in the North, who do two things. They hate slavery and hate negroes. They feel like the woman who in writing to her husband said, they say (or don't say) that absence conquers love; for the longer you stay away the better I love you. But then I know some who, I believe, are really sincere, and who would do anything to help the colored people. I think I know two or three families who would be willing to take the child, and do a good part by her. If you say so, I will write to a friend whom I have now in mind, and if they will consent I will take the child with me when I go North, provided I can do it without having it discovered that she is colored, for it would put me in an awkward fix to have it known that I took a colored child away with me."

"Oh, never fear," said St. Pierre, slapping his friend on the shoulder.
"The child is whiter than you are, and yo