I
shall never forget that half hour. It broke my heart that my
father and I should look on such matters with so different
eyes; and with my prayer for myself, which came from the very
bottom of my heart, I poured out also a flood of love and
tears over him, and of petition that he might have better
eyesight one day. Ah yes! and before it should be too late to
right the wrong he was unconsciously doing.
For now I began to see, in the light of this letter first,
that my father's eyes were not clear but blind in regard to
these matters. And what he said about me led me to think and
believe that his blindness was the effect, not of any
particular hardness or fault in him, but of long teaching and
habit and custom. For I saw that everybody else around me
seemed to take the present condition of things as the true and
best one; only convenient, but natural and proper. Everybody,
that is, who did not suffer by it. I had more than suspicions
that the seven hundred on the estate were of a different mind
here from the half dozen who lived in the mansion; and that
the same relative difference existed on the other plantations
in the neighbourhood.
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