sayed to exercise eye language to convey to her my loyalty to her secret, and I think successfully.

One of the features of the social life of the Southern negro which I was very desirous to witness, it was my misfortune to miss,-a religious service conducted by a negro preacher. But a wedding of the very first water I did have an opportunity to attend. The family were Northern people, and kind to their servants at all times, and the wedding feast would hardly have exhibited more cost, skill, or taste, had it been prepared for a member of the family. It was served in the family dining-room, and the family waited upon the sable guests. A negro preacher in a white vest and necktie, with a showy pair of glasses astride his nose, performed the ceremony with much elocutionary unction. In the negro house at the rear of the back yard, two of the most accomplished performers with the feet contributed a "shake-down," which, though accompanied by music, had no more relation to its rhythm than have the gyrations of a buzz-saw. With out the evidence of one's own eyes, such an exhibition of motion and vibrations of extremities could not be counted possible to human anatomy. Occasionally a leap straight upward of at least two feet seemed to charge the nerves and muscles of feet and legs with a renewed and electric animation, that sent off sprays of motion like the falling fiery ribbons of a rocket. To imagine that these palpitant forms of dexterity, seemingly exhaustless in force and energy, could ever tax your patience by their snail-like dragging slowness, was quite out of the question.

The Southern negro in ante-bellum days was as careless of any future need as the birds of the air, and responded to any call for his peculiar gifts of mimicry and gleeful abandon as naturally as the birds did by song to the inspiration of sunshine and atmosphere.

One of the most pronounced features of climate were the thunder and rain storms. Having great admiration for these heroic moods of nature in that latitude, the sublimity and magnificence of these displays afforded me an intoxication of delight. For two or three hours a continuous rolling and booming of thunder, not a moment of interval, the lightning as continuously flashing in rhythmic regularity. Water, not raining down or falling in streams, but filling the wide space as though the clouds had suddenly let down an ocean of water that was everywhere, the ground a shallow lake from two to six inches in depth.

One morning is a vivid remembrance, when a threatening shower had quickened the gathering at the school-room in which it was my duty to lead the singing at the morning exercises. We had waited during the storm music which well-nigh made our voices inaudible, and held in terror some of the scholars. Finally, near to ten o'clock, the storm ceased suddenly, instantly, as storms always did, as though a faucet turned off water and electricity at one and the same time. The sun shone out, making every leaf on trees and shrubs seem the frame of millions of irridescent diamond globes, and we commenced our morning song. Hardly were we well begun when such a thrilling, nerve intoxicating, marvellous

bird chorus filled the storm freshened, richly perfumed air, as only dwellers in that climate can realize.

The mocking-birds and English robins and larks made a hallelujah chorus full of more exquisite strains and warblings than a Jennie Lind or a Parepa could imitate. With one consent scholars and leader stopped to listen to the divine orchestra.

The after glories of storms were delightful beyond description. The luxuriant foliage, much of it like the magnolia's and bay's, always shining, became a mass of trembling, glistening sheen, bedecked with rainbowtinted drops. The soft blue of the sky seemed ready to drop some celestial elixir, so penetrating was the azure. The soothing exhilaration of sweet odors from numerous flowers and shrubs played upon the senses. The realm of mist and bird life voiced its overflowing vitality and delight,

and all the sweet voices of nature seemed to say, Though the storm comes, beauty and radiance and harmony and delight remain, and the triumph is to them.

"Sorrow endureth for a night, but joy cometh in the morning."

Surrounded by such natural influences, in which an out-door life that filled the senses to satiety was compelling, it was not hard to find a reason why the negro had little enterprise, nor why the master's conscience slumbered, bound by inherited conditions, institutions, and customs. The carelessness and childish abandon to present enjoyment, conspicuously a trait of the Southern negro, had none of the stings of poverty in a rigorous. climate to whet his energies or quicken his thoughts.

Returning after a brief visit North in the summer of '60, it was soon apparent that a crisis was inevitable. Early in the autumn military companies were formed for drill, and, as it chanced that their parade ground was in full view of the porch which the ladies of the family frequented, that performance almost daily seized my prescience like the dim foreboding of a frightful dream.

A cotton warehouse made Claiborne a commercial centre for a considerable extent of outlying country, and for that reason it was a stoppingplace from other quarters. At the hotel table one would hear an expression of divers opinions; and all shades of patriotism, from the Southern sectionalist to the loyal Unionist, were widely represented.

It has been correctly claimed, recently, according to my knowledge, that "it was not a slaveholder's rebellion." Certainly in that section, plantation owners or small farmers, those who had many slaves and those who had few, as a class, would have chosen to remain in the Union had not sectional pride been appealed to by artful demagogues and hot-headed conspirators, seeking to establish a separate civilization and to make for themselves an opportunity to rule, inflamed sectional jealousies by misrepresenting the feelings and intentions of the North.

The difference of comprehension and judgment between the rural population and the people in cities was conspicuous. Those who lived on lines of transportation, or whose business required them to travel and mingle with the Northern people, were capable of appreciating the folly of

making a fight to perpetuate slavery, and were comparatively free from sectional spirit. But those whose world was bounded by home and neighborhood surroundings, seemed as a class to understand only that their property and homes were to be destroyed.

During a trip on the river, after the nomination of Lincoln, it was painfully significant to me to hear the expressions of the ladies, some of whom were city residents, and might have been well read in Southern views and interpretations through publications. The attitude of all with one exception was that the South was threatened by a violation of constitutional rights, to be subject to the aggressive fanaticism of Abolitionists, and exposed to the untamable lust of the freed negro.

The lady referred to was about seventy years of age, and a widow of the man who edited and published the first newspaper established in Alabama, forty years previously. She was an enthusiastic Unionist, and a clear-headed person with very good conversational powers. We were entertained for some hours in the ladies' cabin by her arguments, and rehearsal of the protection of Southern slavery by the U. S. government.

Men came from all parts of the boat and listened quietly to the earnest pleading of this patriotic woman for peace and loyalty. Some questions were asked, evidently with the expectation of embarrassing her, but her keen memory and extensive knowledge of her country's history made her master of the situation. There was no word of disrespect, hardly one of positive dissent from her claims.

Probably few if any of the incipient Confederate soldiers listening to her could have answered her arguments intelligently, or refuted her logic. The thought occurred to me with a pang of foreboding, how much suffering and cost the country might escape if the pleading arguments of that wise matron could prevail to bring the terrible problem to a peaceful and reasonable solution.

After this conversation, as I was sitting at the piano, a bride of sixteen years, resplendent in beauty and diamonds, leaned affectionately towards me, standing at my side, and said, "You don't believe in the South submitting to the Abolitionists, do you?" As I did not instantly respond, she continued eagerly, "You're a Southerner, are n't you?"

"I was born and raised' very near to Canada," I replied, "but I love my whole country, and know no North, no South, no East, no West. It makes my heart ache to think my grandfather's prophecy may be fulfilled. When I was a little child he used to say slavery would have to be abolished if we had a war to do it.' I wish the people of the whole country could be brought together, and shake hands, for then we could n't have a war."

The conception in the minds of some as to what an Abolitionist might be was so grotesque as to be amusing. A young Confederate, who had been stationed at Fort Morgan afte "one old darkie, a dog, and a mule " had been taken by Confederate authority, came home to nurse a fleshwound in his hand. He was given to lively conjectures of the more serious suffering that severe wounds might

inflict, and at times indulged in vigorous denunciation of the "Abolitionists." He inquired what kind of looking people they were, quite in the manner one would do who had heard of some horrid species of savage nowise like to ordinary humanity. Like others, too, who better comprehended what was involved in a fight to preserve slavery, he frequently cursed William L. Yancy and Jefferson Davis. But the loyalty of the Southerner generally to the South was a double distilled patriotism which did not in any like degree embrace their country. This spirit smothered Union sentiment by its aggressive force.

During the secession agitation and the prevailing excitement that followed Lincoln's nomination, it was wonderful to discover how positively the negroes looked to "Massa Linkum" as their sure deliverer. When an occasion offered for private communication, I was frequently asked 'Linkum' was elected," and "how soon he would set us free."

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If I tried to explain that Mr. Lincoln as president would have no power to set them free, they would look sad and thoughtful for a little while, but invariably would close the interview by saying in the most confident manner, "But Massa Linkum he'll set us free," and this conviction seemed equally pungent in the minds of white people.

pany sent as a body-guard to Davis at Montgomery, when the Confederate administration was in that city. They were a picked and splendid display of physical manhood and military accomplishment. As a young man stepped on deck, and was grasped by the hand of some city official apparently acting as host, the soldier said with an imperial air of assurance, "I'll bring you one of his eye teeth!" meaning Lincoln's.

It was as if the voice of fate had whispered in every soul, of the master and the slave, the white and the black, that Lincoln was the man chosen of God to break in pieces the system which had been their inheritance, and to remove the curse of the nation and the wrongs of the slave.

It was a poignant sorrow to witness the opening of that deadly strife between brother and brother, friend and friend. The kindness received in that land, and up to the moment of departure, when a richly filled lunch basket, and a carriage my friends of a short acquaintance would not allow me to pay for, were provided, will remain a sweet remembrance forever.

When my thoughts revert to that beautiful land and its kind-hearted people, I dream of the time when the blight of slavery and war will have disappeared, and the social life and institutions of the sunny South shall harmonize with its natural beauties and delights, and its wealth of reSources. God and human wisdom