the many exits of the Dismal Swamp Canal. Crossing Hampton Roads a grand bay with pleasant grassy shores, destined one day to become the best known, as by nature it is the noblest, of Atlantic ports-we nearly ran upon the wrecks of the Federal frigates Cumberland and Congress, sunk by the rebel ram Merrimac in the first great naval action of the war; but soon after, by a sort of poetic justice, we almost drifted into the black hull of the Merrimac herself. Great gangs of negroes were labouring laughingly at the removal, by blasting, of the sunken ships.

When we were securely moored at Norfolk pier, I set off upon an inspection of the second city of Virginia. Again not a white man was to be seen, but hundreds of negroes were working in the heat, building, repairing, road-making, and happily chattering the while. At last, turning a corner, I came on an hotel, and, as a consequence, on a bar and its crowd of swaggering whites-"Johnny Rebs" all, you might see by the breadth of their brims, for across the Atlantic a broad-brim denotes less the man of peace than the ex-member of a Southern guerilla band, Morgan's, Mosby's, or Stuart's. No Southerner will wear the Yankee " stove-pipe" hat; a Panama or Palmetto for him, he says, though he keeps to the long black coat that rules from Maine to the Rio Grande.

These Southerners were all alike—all were upright, tall, and heavily moustached; all had long black hair and glittering eyes, and I looked instinctively for the baldric and the rapier. It needed no second glance to assure me that, as far as the men of Norfolk were concerned, the saying of our Yankee skipper was not far from truth: "The last idea that enters the mind of a Southerner is that of doing work."

Strangers are scarce in Norfolk, and it was not long before I found an excuse for entering into conversation with the "citizens." My first question was not received with much cordiality by my new acquaintance. "How do the negroes work? Wall, we spells nigger with two 'g's,' I reckon." Virginians, I must explain, are used to "reckon" as much as are New Englanders to "guess," while Western men calculate" as often as they cease to swear.) "How does the niggers work? Wall, niggers is darned fools, certain, but they ain't quite sich fools as to work while the Yanks will feed 'em. No,

sir, not quite sich fools as that." Hardly deeming it wise to point to the negroes working in the sun-blaze within a hundred yards, while we sat rocking ourselves in the verandah of the inn, I changed my tack, and asked whether things were settling down in Norfolk. This query soon led my friends upon the line I wanted them to take, and in five minutes we were well through politics, and plunging into the very war. "You're from England. Now, all that they tell you's darned lies.. We're just as secesh as we ever was, only so many's killed that we can't fight-that's all, I reckon." "We ain't going to fight the North and West again," said an ex-colonel of rebel infantry; "next time we fight, 'twill be us and the West against the Yanks. We'll keep the old flag then, and be darned to them.""If it hadn't been for the politicians, we shouldn't have seceded at all, I reckon : we should just have kept the old flag and the constitution, and the Yanks would have seceded from us. Reckon we'd have let 'em go." "Wall, boys, s'pose we liucr," closed in the colonel, shooting out his old quid, and filling in with another. "We'd have fought for a lifetime if the cussed Southerners hadn't deserted like they did." I asked who these "Southerners" were to whom such disrespect was being shown. "You didn't think Virginia was a Southern State over in Britain, did you? 'cause Virginia's a border State, sir. We didn't go to secede at all; it was them blasted Southerners that brought it on us. First, they wouldn't give a command to General Robert E. Lee, then they made us do all the fighting for 'em, and then, when the pinch came, they left us in the lurch. Why, sir, I saw three Mississippi regiments surrender without a blow-yes, sir. That's right down good whisky; jess you sample it." Here the steamwhistle of the Saratoga sounded with its deep bray. "Reckon you'll have to hurry up to make connexions,” said one of my new friends, and I hurried off, not without a fear lest some of the group should shoot after me, to avenge the affront of my quitting them before the mixing of the drinks. They were but a pack of "mean whites," "North Carolina crackers," but their views were those which I found dominant in all ranks at Richmond, and up the country in Virginia.

After all, the Southern planters are not "The South," which

for political purposes is composed of the "mean whites," of the Irish of the towns, and of the South-Western menMissourians, Kentuckians, and Texans-fiercely anti-Northern, without being in sentiment what we should call Southern : certainly not representatives of the "Southern Chivalry." The "mean whites," or "poor trash," are the whites who are not planters-members of the slave-holding race who never held a slave-white men looked down upon by the negroes. It is a necessary result of the despotic government of one race by another that the poor members of the dominant people are universally despised: the "destitute Europeans" of Bombay, the "white loafers" of the Punjaub, are familiar cases. Where slavery exists, the "poor trash" class must inevitably be both large and wretched: primogeniture is necessary to keep the plantations sufficiently great to allow for the payment of overseers and the supporting in luxury of the planter family, and younger sons and their descendants are not only left destitute, but debarred from earning their bread by honest industry, for in a slave country labour is degrading.

The Southern planters were gentlemen, possessed of many aristocratic virtues, along with every aristocratic vice; but to each planter there were nine "mean whites," who, though grossly ignorant, full of insolence, given to the use of the knife and pistol upon the slightest provocation, were, until the election of Lincoln to the presidency, as completely the rulers of America as they were afterwards the leaders of the rebellion.

At sunset we started up the James on our way to City Point and Richmond, sailing almost between the very masts of the famous rebel privateer the Florida, and seeing her as she lay under the still, grey waters. She was cut out from a Brazilian port, and when claimed by the imperial government was to have been at once surrendered. While the despatches were on their way to Norfolk, she was run into at her moorings by a Federal gunboat, and filled and sank directly. Friends of the confederacy have hinted that the collision was strangely opportune; nevertheless, the fact remains that the commander of the gunboat was dismissed the navy for his carelessness.

The twilight was beyond description lovely. The change

from the auks and ice-birds of the Atlantic to the blue-birds and robins of Virginia was not more sudden than that from winter to tropical warmth and sensuous indolence; but the scenery, too, of the river is beautiful in its very changelessness. Those who can see no beauty but in boldness, might call the James as monotonous as the lower Loire.

After weeks of bitter cold, warm evenings favour meditation. The soft air, the antiquity of the forest, the languor of the sunset breeze, all dispose to day-dream or to sleep. That oak has seen Powhatan; the founders of Jamestown may have pointed at that grand old sycamore. In this drowsy humour, we sighted the far-famed batteries of Newport News, and turning-in to berth or hammock, lay all night at City Point, near Petersburg.

A little before sunrise, we weighed again, and sought a passage through the tremendous Confederate "obstructions." Rows of iron skeletons, the frameworks of the wheels of sunken steamers, showed above the stream, casting gaunt shadows westward, and varied only by here and there a battered smokestack or a spar. The whole of the steamers that had plied upon the James and the canals before the war were lying here in rows, sunk lengthwise along the stream. Two in the middle of each row had been raised to let the Government vessels pass, but in the heat-mist and faint light the navigation was most difficult. For five-and-twenty miles the rebel forts were as thick as the hills and points allowed; yet in spite of booms and bars, of sunken ships, of batteries and torpedoes, the Federal Monitors once forced their way to Fort Darling in the outer works of Richmond. I remembered these things a few weeks later, when General Grant's first words to me at Washington were: "Glad to meet you. What have you seen? The Capitol? Go at once and see the Monitors." He afterwards said to me, in words that photograph not only the Monitors, but Grant: "You can batter away at those things for a month, and do no good."

At Dutch Gap, we came suddenly upon a curious scene. The river flowed towards us down a long straight reach, bounded by a lofty hill crowned with tremendous earthworks; but through a deep trench or cleft, hardly fifty yards in length, upon our right, we could see the stream running with violence

in a direction parallel with our course. The hills about the gully were hollowed out into caves and bomb-proofs, evidently meant as shelters from vertical fire, but the rough graves of a vast cemetery showed that the protection was sought in vain. Forests of crosses of unpainted wood rose upon every acre of flat ground. On the peninsula, all but made an island by the cleft, was a grove of giant trees, leafless, barkless, dead, and blanched by a double change in the level of the stream. There is no sight so sad as that of a drowned forest, with a turkeybuzzard on each bough. On the bank upon our left was an iron scaffold, eight or ten stories high-" Butler's Look-out," as the cleft was Butler's Dutch Gap Canal." The canal, unfinished in war, is now to be completed at State expense for purposes of trade.

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As we rounded the extremity of the peninsula, an eagle was seen to light upon a tree. From every portion of the ship— main deck, hurricane deck, lower deck ports-revolvers ready capped and loaded were brought to bear upon the bird, who sheered off unharmed amid a storm of bullets. After this incident, I was careful in my political discussions with my shipmates; disarmament in the Confederacy had clearly not been extended to private weapons.

The outer and inner lines of fortifications passed, we came in view of a many-steepled town with domes and spires recalling Oxford, hanging on a bank above a crimson-coloured. foaming stream. In ten minutes we were alongside the wharf at Richmond, and in half an hour safely housed in the "Exchange" Hotel, kept by the Messrs. Carrington, of whom the father was a private, the son a colonel, in the rebel Volunteers.

The next day, while the works and obstructions on the James were still fresh in my mind, I took train to Petersburg, the city the capture of which by Grant was the last blow struck by the North at the melting forces of the Confederacy.

The line showed the war: here and there the track, torn up in Northern raids, had barely been repaired; the bridges were burnt and broken; the rails worn down to an iron thread. The joke on "board," as they say here for "in the train," was that the engine drivers down the line are tolerably 'cute men,