petuate the memory of their sin and shame, or even to deepen their sense of humiliation by rejoicing in the triumph of the Government. My concern was quite useless. They are made of sterner stuff than I supposed. No such trivial matter humiliates them. We had foolishly thought that men who had been prominent in the rebellion would at its close have slunk into deepest shade, and remained unseen and unheard. They have shown little of such womanly weakness, and their women, perhaps, least of all. Editors, political and literary, delight still to report the battles of the late war, and always to the praise of the confederates. State executives and legislatures are equally forward in referring to Southern patriotic heroism, in declining to accept the terms imposed by the Government. I have desired to see the memorials sent on to Washington by leading confederate officers, imploring pardon for their part in the rebellion. I am curious to know how they contrive to place their zeal, activity, and heroism, among the chief supports of their claims to pardon. Many had thought this all out of taste, not remembering what the world was taught so long ago, that "there is no disputing about taste." I yield this point, together with any other weakness-that we should be very careful not to cherish the memory of our chivalrous brother's sin, and not to deepen his humiliation by rejoicing in our triumph.

A large garden of several acres of ground was near the house. This was not wanting in choice shrubbery, trees, and plants, and had doubtless been finely cultivated with annuals. We cut several sticks, designing to have them made into walking-sticks, but we have not yet tried them so as to know whether they may be trusted for support in the day of need. On another side of the house the door-yard expanded into quite a grove, the green sward of which was kept clean in some way, probably by annual inundations, as it lay somewhat lower than the ground near the house. The prevailing trees on this ground were a species of water-oak unknown at the North. These were thickly hung with great locks of the moss peculiar to the South, generally several feet in length. Waving in gentle breezes, these gray locks gave a sense of venerableness and majesty, and in this respect were the more impressive, as they were the solitary objects adapted to inspire such feelings, unless, perhaps, the negro patriarch, sitting in his little cabin, might be added. And yet, art had done nothing for these grounds, except for the garden, and that it had surrounded with a fence of crooked and irregular pickets, split by the negroes from oak logs.

The day was fair, the sky of clearest blue. Here and there only a

cloud, of smallest dimensions and almost transparent, was seen sailing across the horizon, as if an angel of good tidings driven by a wind, sent on purpose to bear it, and not reaching down to the earth beneath. It was such a day as one likes to spend in the open air. My traveling companion, the young missionary, and myself, started on a tour of the peninsula, they in a buggy, I upon a horse, all furnished us by the commander of the troops, who, together with the surgeon, went with us as far as the plantation of Joseph E. Davis. Every thing was astir, though with the sluggishness which either belongs to the negro nature, or springs from his discipline of bondage. The fields, perhaps from the neglect of years past, were grown up to weeds, in many places to the height of six feet. These the colored people were gathering preparatory to plowing and planting.

Our observations must be grouped and not separately detailed. We visited three camps-those on the J. E. Davis, the Lovell, and the Woods plantations. The first was a kind of headquarters of social and commercial life. There the steamers touched and left the news. Near this place lay the gunboat which had been set to watch the sunken Indianola, and would, as we were informel, assist to repel an attack on the peninsula, in case the guerrillas should give sufficient notice of their intentions, so that an order to that effect might be sent on from Washington. Joseph E. Davis is an elder brother of Jefferson Davis, was a much richer man than the rebel President, and is said to have presented to the latter the plantation which he owned at the opening of the war. It has been further said, this brother was loyal at heart, was dragged into the rebellion against his own convictions, and was in consequence, at the time of our visit, a wanderer from home. His house had been burnt down, though not by design. A rather fine building, erected for a library, was still standing, and was occupied by several missionary teachers, one of whom had the small-pox at the time. With these desolations, and these facts in mind, who could avoid picturing in imagination the heart-burnings, perhaps never to be revealed in this world, which this great civil war has engendered, not between the two great sections of our land, but perhaps between neighbors, friends, and brothers? Such may exist everywhere in the South, unknown to us in the distance, and continue to bear their bitter fruits for a generation to come.

Our next visit was to the so-called Lovell plantation. This had been owned jointly by a Mr. Turner and the late General Quitman, to whose heirs Mr. Turner, dying, had left the whole. Several of these, at least more than one, had married brothers by the name of Lovell.

These ladies had taken the oath of allegiance required by our Government. As a consequence, this property had been restored to them, and they were daily expected to take possession. Their husbands were in the Confederate army, but with great magnanimity had consented that they should take the oath. There was in this arrangement between husband and wife a prudent provision for whichever issue Providence might give to the war, and these pious ladies, and doubtless, too, their liberal-minded husbands, felt a spirit of calm resignation to Providence. They claimed also the return of the furniture. Most of this had been taken to the Jeff. Davis plantation, where we slept two nights upon a bedstead and under a canopy supported by mahogany posts which might have served very well the purpose of columns in a cathedral. They demanded also about one hundred bales of cotton which had disappeared, in regard to which, at least, the best thing which the Government could do, would be to let them look it up themselves, and there would doubtless be persons whose interest in defeating the search would be just equal to theirs in its success.

The overseer was anxiously waiting for the arrival of these heirs. Fearful for his life, he scarcely dared to go out of the house. He claimed that there was naught against him but the hated name of overseer; the colored people claimed more. That name, however, had acquired by its associations a fearful import. There were also three missionary teachers (a gentleman and two ladies) in the house. The love of the colored people for them kept off violence, and doubtless gave to the overseer a more profound regard for the missionaries and their labor of love than he might otherwise have cherished—at least he had a much greater love for them than his class has generally felt for Northern missionaries.

As a contraband camp, the chief interest was in the Woods plantation. There, more than fifteen hundred persons were thrown together without houses. With these their masters had hitherto provided them. They were therefore making their first independent efforts at building, without tools or materials, science or art. Split sticks, about half as large as common fence rails, were laid up into square pens, or stood upon the ends, the tops of two rows leaning against each other. One of the two open ends of this latter form of structure was closed with the same kind of pieces, and the other was hung with fragments of a quilt, which was the prevailing form of door throughout the village. These were the two general styles of architecture, of which one might be called the Grecian, the other the

Gothic, though no house that I saw was a slavish imitation of any thing which I had ever known before under those names. Others were modifications of the one or the other, or combinations of both, and the variations were very considerable. No student of architecture, who delights to find in the most perfect specimens of art some idea which he can trace back to the Tartar tent or the cabin of the wandering Gothic or Pelasgic tribes, should by any means have failed to seek, in some such contraband village as this, the verification of his theory.

The sun was shut out, the earth formed the floor, and of course, from the absence of the sun, was always damp. The open air, with no shelter from rain, would have been vastly better, and so we found all except the sick instinctively seeking it. Small-pox was among the people. Not a few were down with it; one lay dressed for the grave.

The missionaries, of whom there were six went with us among these huts. When we found the quilts which formed the doors down, we considered the doors locked, and presumed that the family was out; when drawn aside, we supposed the family to be at home, and entered. We usually, however, found them outside. I never felt myself so good an illustration of Byron's line, which makes man a "pendulum betwixt a smile and tear," as at this time. I did vibrate between the two; the profoundly sad and profoundly ludicrous never came so near together in my mind, each alternately claiming the control. The vibrations were quick; to change the figure, the fountains of sweet and bitter waters seemed opened into one. These people were cheerful, even jocose. God has given them a nature happily suited to their lot. Pain affects them only while it lasts; it plants no thorn which festers long after the puncture; they borrow little grief for the future, retain little from the past. Light breaks forth so suddenly from behind the cloud, that the tear-drops of their deepest anguish are still there to form the rainbow of their joy. But we could not drop from the picture of their future the time which it will take to heal the prints of the irons and the rods, to struggle upward in the scale of humanity until they shall have gained the level which they ought to seize and to hold, and the trials which await them during this interval. They are as a nation just born, unconscious as infancy whither they are going, and what awaits them by the way.

In passing through the streets and avenues of this magic city, various incidents of great interest attracted my attention, but I must omit the mention of all but one, which is too characteristic and illus

trative to be passed over. An under officer asked me to go with him into a cabin, to see a man and his wife who had been badly whipped, the former so that he would probably be confined to his bed for weeks. This man had been appointed a kind of overseer, with no authority, however, but to give a little direction to the labor, and note the times of arrival and departure of the people. Those men enlisted as soldiers deemed themselves official personages, whose wives, according to their notions, ought to be supported without labor. This overseer's account revealed deficiencies of these soldiers' wives, as well as those of others, and he must atone for it by being dragged from his bed in the night, and whipped just so as to leave him alive, his wife also suffering with him. This presented a sad feature of the institution which brought these people among us. Is this cruelty a native tendency, or has it been taught them by the practice of their overseers upon themselves? It has been claimed by masters as their apology for taking the discipline of slave children out of the hands of their own parents, that they do this to save the children from unmerciful beatings.

Since our visit, great changes have been wrought. The camps of which those at Davis's Bend were specimens, together with the whole system of which they were a part, have been swept away. The work of teaching and evangelizing, which, so far as the West is concerned, made its headquarters in that vicinity, has been taken up by the religious bodies of the land and systematized, and is now being prosecuted with no small degree of vigor and earnestness. Jefferson Davis had not yet at that time awaked from his dream of greatness as the head of the magnificent Southern empire, built upon slavery as its chief corner-stone, but had still managed to hold that uneasy seat at Richmond for which he had bartered his quiet home on the Mississippi. The bubble having burst, his name is a by-word. But would it in the end have been very different with his name, even had he succeeded? A government thus founded would have dwindled, from the day of its establishment to the not distant one of its extinction. True, he would have been regarded and petted for a time as a hero, in a cause now despised by the whole world, and most of all by the nation which helped him most. This despicable position would not have remained long unperceived after he should have closed his successful struggle, nor would anarchy, made of such materials, have been long absent. How should we like to know-could we learn it in any other than the only possible way-what was each stage of the progress of Jefferson Davis's dream of greatness, from its inception, through the whole period of his residence at the Bend, and at our national capital—