in his church upon the institution of the "negro pew." "Why," said he, “do you put the colored people way off in a distant corner of the meeting-house by themselves, as though they were so many baboons, for the boys to make fun of and grin at?" It seems to me cruel and unchristian! He would not go into a slave land, because he said he would not go where he could not speak his mind. .

As Captain John Smith made his first settlement at Jamestown, I made my first landing in Virginia at that point in a steamer from Baltimore, which was enroute up the James for Richmond. So in my starting I went back to first principles. It seems that the colony, being almost entirely composed of men, had for years a lonely time. Their hearts were aching for the smiles of women, and their ears longing to hear the merry voices of children ringing out on the air. Even the cry of one lusty infant waking up from his nap and kicking his little legs, hungry and bawling for his supper, would have been sweeter music to them than that of an entire brass band. The Virginia company took pity on their forlorn condition and sent over first ninety and then sixty virtuous, but poor young maidens, as wives for the planters; and we may add, beautiful; that is, as women go, which sometimes is not astonishing.

Why some newspaper reporter was not about to report the scene when the women went ashore is not an honor to the fraternity. We may imagine the scene. The girls doubtless went ashore two-by-two, arm-in-arm on their way to the company's office, while the bachelors stood in lines through which they passed. The girls were giggling, blushing, hanging down their heads and stumbling in their excitement against one another; while the men looked on, sedate, solemn as owls, their eyes so widely stretched to drink in the charms, that the corners entirely disappeared and became round like the eyes of so many fish. And when one pair of these fish-shaped eyes lit upon a damsel of extra charms, we venture to say he nudged his elbow into his neighbor's ribs and exclaimed, "Oh, Tim, ain't she a daisy?"

These girls were sold for tobacco; the first lot for 100 pounds each, the second for 150. That is 18,000 pounds for

the entire lot, or an average of 120 pounds each and about a pound of tobacco for a pound of girl. And when there was a damsel sold of choisest beauty and charms, over whom there was a warm competition, it is presumed there was planked down the choicest quality of "Jeem's river."

History tells us there was a dignity about a debt for a wife that did not appertain to any other debt. He must be a poor shoat that did not pay up in full. Any man of delicate sensibilities would feel uncomfortable to think that say twenty pounds of his wife still belonged in equity to the company. It should dignify tobacco to every womanly mind to think how useful t might again become in the line of matrimony.

The family joys now began to swell the hearts of the planters. Between the rows of their tobacco plants, the footprints of little ones soon met their eyes and lightened the toil of its production.

When I went ashore at Jamestown, the great puffing monster leaving me alone soon disappeared around a bend. I looked on the country in front. It was flat as the river behind, not even a dwelling in sight, not a human being, all is solitude. The bachelors were gone with their great fish eyes. The giggling girls were gone. The tobacco was gone, not even an old dry quid lying around anywhere.

All there was to be seen to arrest the eye, the only relic where had once been a busy town, was the tower of an old church, burnt two centuries before. It was a ruin, overgrown with ivy, and built of brick imported from England in the days of "the Jeems." It stood on the edge of a clump of woods and its rear was the old church-yard with the graves of the long-forgotten dead.

Drawing my portfolio from my knapsack, I rapidly sketched the tower, and from that original engravings have been made for many different books in the last forty years. I then buckled on my knapsack and crossed the fields for Williamsburg on the York, seven miles distant. The day was pleasant, the air soft and balmy; but I was in a land of slaves. I had come from a land of freedom. What were my emotions? Grand and glorious. I felt the nation owed a debt of gratitude to old Virginia.

Her very form was grateful to my eye on the map, and when it was marred by the excision of West Virginia, I felt as though a sacrilege had been committed. The memories of the great men she had given to the country in the time of her great struggle, and in the forming years of her government, crowded upon me. Washington, Patrick Henry, John Marshall, Jefferson, Madison, and a host of others, prove that slave owners can be men of the loftiest patriotism and possess the brightest virtues that adorn humanity.

I was soon to meet slavery, and it struck me, not as presented at the hands of a kind Christian gentleman who felt for the best welfare of a mass of humble dependents, but a few removes from savage Africa; but it struck me butt-end first from the hands of a negro driver, a Virginian, the first white man I was to meet on my introduction to Virginia soil.

After walking a mile across the fields I discovered a body of men whom I approached to inquire my way, and found them to be a gang of slaves, working a few feet only apart, and in their midst stood a solitaray white man, their overseer. They were armed with heavy hoes, mattocks I think they called them, and were busy grubbing the ground. They looked stolid, stupid and sad, as they lifted up their coarse implements and then sunk them in the earth. It was a novel sight to the overseer, my appearance, a stranger on foot and bearing a knapsack. On learning I had just landed and was from the north, he opened up the subject on their "peculiar institution." In less than two minutes that man said to me in a calm voice: "I'd as lief kill a nigger as kill a dog." With this a sardonic grin spread over his countenance and I looked around to see what effect his words had upon his group of abject beings. They looked as before, stolid, stupid, sad, while their coarse implements continued to go up in the air and descending, cleave the earth-God's earth!

Moments come to us all, supreme moments, when impressions are made that will last forever; these are at times when our intellects are as crystal and every chord in our being is attuned to the touch of the most delicate harmonies. A few weeks after my interview with the overseer I was out one morning in

Richmond enjoying the beauty and silence of its environs where the city was losing itself amid grassy hills and soft green foliage. The dew was glistening around my feet and the shadows long over the landscape were streaked here and there in golden streamers from the rising sun. My intellect was clear as crystal. God had given another morning to the world, fresh and all glorious. and it was to me a moment of supreme enjoyment when suddenly I was startled by the laugh of a child, a laugh so joyous that I instantly turned to learn its source; my eye at once lit upon a little fellow, black as ebony, about five years of age, standing close by me, not twenty feet away, attired in a single garment, apparently oblivious to my presence. He had seen something, I know not what, perhaps the gambols of some young dogs, that had amused him and his face was so beautiful in his joy that I felt like taking him to my heart.

And this child was a slave, and happy in his ignorance. I thought sadly, "Poor little fellow! You do not know your fate. These rich, these powerful ones around you have a mortgage upon you from your very birth. They will say, You shall neither learn to read, nor write, nor own a home, nor possess property except by our permission. Even your wife and children, if you ever obtain them, we shall tear from you at our option, and you shall see them no more, nor learn their fate.

"The Great Master has placed you and us in a world of beauty and mystery and has given to every human being that immortal principle that yearns for its knowledge and enjoyment. But the refined and beautiful things shall be closed to you, for you are born a slave; and if necessary to enforce obedience we shall pursue you with the lash of the task-master even to the brink of the grave."

This picture, this speech, flashed through my mind in connection with that joyous laugh and happy face beautiful in its innocence, the face of a weak, helpless child, and an entire commonwealth, more than a million strong, arrayed against it. Yet it is but right to say that among that million were multitudes who looked upon their position with sadness, but were powerless to prevent it.

They felt how monstrous that system, that accursed entail

from their fathers that could only exist by repressing and crushing in ere they could bud the noblest instincts and yearnings of humanity. This, as in the mysterious case of Caspar Hauser who was imprisoned from infancy without being allowed to learn to talk, was defined by the German jurists as the "Nameless crime against the human soul."

Within a short time I had visited Williamsburg, Yorktown, and Hanover Court House, taken sketches and collected some highly valuable historical material. I had met some of the most charming of people among the aristocracy, and been the recipient of their hospitality. Their frankness, simplicity and ease of manner was grateful.

At Williamsburg I called on Beverly Tucker, the President of the College, William and Mary. He was an old man with long, gray hair streaming down his back; and one of great learning. How he came to speak of it I do not recollect, but he told of the affection of the students for him, that if any indignity was offered him they would risk their lives in his behalf. As he spoke his eyes filled with tears. I was indeed surprised at this exhibition of tenderness of emotion and child-like simplicity. No Northern College President would have so exhibited himself. But it was "Old Virginia" all over. Her good people carried their hearts on their sleeves.

He was the uncle of Judge Randolph Tucker who addressed you last spring at Marietta; so the latter told me. I had gone up to him at the close of his speech and told him who I was, when he looked as though Rip Van Winkle had appeared, and then exclaimed, "Is it posible!" In like manner was Senator Daniel astonished at the close of his Marietta address, when the throng had crowded around, shaking his hands. for his patriotic speech and I made myself known to him. Whereupon he dropped mine, and raising both of his aloft, and then placing a palm on each shoulder, looked me square in the face and exclaimed, "My Heavens, there have been two men I have being waiting to see from boyhood, Peter Parley and Henry Howe, and now I see one of them!" On comparing notes, I found he was born in the very year I was traveling over his be