We can have no extensive acquaintance with its presence and power in society until we have met and felt its chafing and friction-grinding power in the strange relations and contacts of a selfish and suspicious world. Our ideas and feelings are not sufficiently humanized and catholic in their sway. And when we think they are, frequently on occasion we are waked up to discover they are not. The thought is unwelcome, that in this we exhibit still, in despite our genteel and generous progress, the unconscious affinities of barbarism.
But why do we thus comment? Because in our five years' Texas experience we met this monster of the human heart in shapes and phases, deeper, darker, and more vile than we had ever dreamed of before, or could have dreamed if we had never seen Texas. There this barbarous element assumes a more lawless and criminal form than in any other country we ever saw. There it hesitates not at doing personal violence to its object. And so much the more as they value human life less than other people. Comparatively, Northern people can scarcely imagine what prejudice means except in milder forms, and as defined in dictionaries, pulpit theories, and so forth.
A lady friend said to us on our return from that country: "Mr. N., you ought to be a wiser man for what you have seen in Texas." A gentleman was kind enough to say to us: "Served you right, you had no business to go there in the first place." Now we do not of course ask the alms of sympathy in our Texas experience, particularly from such as might feel harmed by the exercise of that noble grace, but simply appear as the writer of a little personal history.
Perhaps no Northern man was more unfortunately situated in Texas than the writer. He had gone there just a few months prior to the war, which, to the eye of prejudice, was evidence, _prima facie_, that he was a spy, or something else inimical to the country's welfare. If not, why was he there at that late day? The incident we wish to relate is in the following.
Sometime in June, 1864, the writer had an appointment for a two-days' meeting, fourteen miles away, at a place called U---- H----, Saturday and Sunday. On the morning of the sixth day of the week, the splendid clay-bank saddle-horse was brought out, young and vigorous, and the preacher placing himself in the Spanish saddle, was on his way to the religious meeting, reaching there two hours before the time. Preached at eleven o'clock A. M. to a large week-day audience in a neat house of worship situated in a beautiful grove on a hill which was the highest land-point in the county. He was the invited guest of a local preacher, at whose instance the appointment had originally been made.