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Spirits are the last thing I'll give into," said Sir David Brewster.

"O ye miserable mystics!" cried the eloquent Ferrier, "have ye bethought yourselves of the backward and downward course which ye are running into the pit of the bestial and the abhorred ?”

"How very undignified for a spirit to rap on tables and talk commonplace!" objected the transcendentalists, who looked for Orphic sayings and Delphian profundities.

To all which the investigators replied: We merely take facts as we find them. The conjurers and the professors fail to account for what we see and hear. Sir David may give or refuse what name he pleases: the phenomena remain. Professor Ferrier may wax indignant; but his indignation does not explain why tables, guitars, and tumblers of water are lifted and carried about by invisible and impenetrable intelligent forces. We are sorry the manifestations do not please our transcendental friends. Could we have our own way, these spirits, forces, intelligences — call them what you will should talk like Carlyle and deport themselves like Grandison. Could we have our own way, there should be no rattlesnakes, no copperheads, no mad dogs. 'Tis a great puzzle to us why Infinite Power allows such things. We do not see the use of them, the cui bono? Still we accept the fact of their existence. And so we do of what, in the lack of a name less vague, we call spirits. There are many drunkards, imbeciles, thieves, hypocrites, and traitors, who quit this life. According to the transcendental theory, these ought to be converted at once, by some magical presto-change! into saints and sages, their identity wholly merged or obliterated. If the All-Wise One does not see it in that light, we cannot help it. If He can afford to wait, we shall not impatiently rave. It would seem that the Eternal chariot-wheels must continue to roll and flash on, however professors, conjurers, and quarterly reviewers may burn their poor little hands by trying to catch at the spokes. "I did not bargain for this," grumbles the habitual novelreader, resentfully throwing down our book.

Bear with us yet a moment longer, injured friend.

During these same fourteen years of which we have spoken,

the Slave Power of the South having, through the annexation of Texas, plunged the country into a war with Mexico for the extension of the area of slavery, met its first great rebuff in the establishment of California as a Free State of the Union. The Fugitive-Slave Bill was given in 1850 to appease the slaveholding caste. Soon afterwards followed the repeal of that Missouri Compromise which had prohibited slavery north of a certain line. It was hoped that these two concessions would prove such a tub thrown to the whale as would divert him from mischief.

Then came the deadly struggle for supremacy in Kansas; pro-slavery ruffianism, on the one side, striving to dedicate the virgin soil to the uses of slavery; and the spirit of freedom, on the other side, resisting the profanation. The contest was long, doubtful, and bloody; but freedom, thank God! prevailed in the end. Slavery thus came to grief a second time; for the lords of the lash well knew that to circumscribe their system was to doom it, and that without ever new fields for extension it could not live and prosper.

One John Brown, of Ossawatomie in Kansas, during these years having learnt what it was to come under the ban of the Slave Power, — having been hunted, hounded, shot at, and had a son brutally murdered by the devilish hate, born of slayery, and engendering such dastardly butchers as Quantrell, resolved to do what little service he could to God and man, by trying to wipe out an injustice that had long enough outraged heaven and earth. With less than fifty picked men he rashly seized on Harper's Ferry, held it for some days, and threw old Virginia into fits. He was seized and hung; and many good men approved the hanging; but in little more than a year afterwards, John Brown's soul was "marching on" in the song of the Northern soldiery going South to battle against rebellion, until the very Charlestown where his gallows was set up was made to ring with the terrible refrain in his honor, the echoes of which are now audible in every State, from Maine to Louisiana. Slavery first showed its ungloved hand at the Democratic Convention at Charleston in 1860 for the nomination of President. Here it was that Stephen A. Douglas, the very man who had given to the South as a boon the repeal of the Mis

souri Compromise, was rejected by the Southern conspirators against the Union, and John C. Breckenridge, the potential and soon actual traitor, was put in nomination as the extreme proslavery candidate against Douglas. And thus the election of Abraham Lincoln, the candidate pledged against slavery extension, was secured.

This election" is not the cause of secession, but the opportunity," said Mr. Robert Barnwell Rhett of South Carolina. Slavery shall be the corner-stone of our new Confederacy,” said Mr. A. H. Stephens, Confederate Vice-President, who a few weeks before, namely, in January, 1861, had said in the Georgia Convention: "For you to attempt to overthrow such a government as this, under which we have lived for more than three quarters of a century, with unbounded prosperity and rights unassailed, is the height of madness, folly, and wickedness, to which I can neither lend my sanction nor my vote."

After raising armies for seizing Washington and for securing the Border States to slavery, Mr. Jefferson Davis, President of the improvised Confederacy, proclaimed to an amused and admiring world, "All we want is to be let alone."

Peaceful reader of the year 1875 (pardon the presumption that bids us hope such a reader will exist), bear with us for these digressions. In your better day let us hope all these terrible asperities will have passed away. But, while we write, our country's fate hangs poised. It is her great historic hour. Daily do our tears fall for the wounded or the slain. Daily do we regret that we, too, cannot give something better than words, thicker than tear-drops, to our country. But thus, through blood and anguish and purifying sufferings, is God leading us to that better future which you shall enjoy.

"The creature is great, to whom it is allowed to imagine questions to which only a God can reply." -Aimé Martin.

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O one who has travelled largely through the Southern States will require to be told that the slave system sanctions the holding in slavery of persons who are undistinguishable in complexion from the whitest Anglo-Saxons. Several carefully authenticated cases, analogous to that developed in our story, though surpassing it in unspeakable baseness, have been recently brought to light. We need only hint at them at this stage of our narrative.

The reader has already divined that the little girl sold at the slave-auction, and placed under Mrs. Gentry's care, was no other than the unfortunate child whose parents were lost in the disaster of the Pontiac.

There is a class of minds which, either from inertness or lack of leisure, never revise the opinions they have received from others. If we might borrow a fresh illustration from Mrs. Gentry's copy-books, we might say that in her mental growth the tree was inclined precisely as the twig had been bent. She honestly believed that there was no appeal from what her sire, the judge, had once laid down as law or gospel. Having been bred in the belief that slavery was a wholesome and sacred institution, she would probably have seen her own sister dragged under it to the auction-block, and not have ventured to question the righteousness of the act.

There were only two passions which, should they ever come

in direct collision with her veneration for slavery, might possibly override it; but even on this there seemed to rest much uncertainty. Her acquisitiveness, as the phrenologists would have called it, was large; and then, although she was fast declining into the sere and yellow leaf, she had not surrendered all hope of one day finding a successor to the late Mr. Gentry in her affections.

Regarding poor little Clara Berwick (or Ellen Murray) as a slave, she could never be so far moved by the child's winning presence and ways as to look on her as entitled to the same atmosphere and sun as herself. No infantile grace, no solicitation of affection, could ever melt the icy barrier with which the pride and self-seeking, fostered by slavery, had encircled the heart, not naturally bad, of the schoolmistress. And yet she did her duty by the child to the best of her ability. Though not a highly educated person, Mrs. Gentry was shrewd enough to employ for her pupils the most accomplished teachers; and in respect to Clara she faithfully carried out Mr. Ratcliff's directions. True, she always exacted an obedience that was unquestioning and blind. She did not care to see that the child could have been led by a silken thread, only satisfy her reason or appeal to her affections. And so it was to Esha that Clara would always have to go for sympathy, both in her sorrows and her joys; and it was Esha whose influence was felt in the very depths of that fresh and sensitive

nature.

From her third to her fourteenth year Clara gave little promise of beauty. Ratcliff, on receiving her photographs, used to throw them aside with a "Psha! After all, she 'll be fit only for a household drudge."

But as she emerged into her sixteenth year, and features and form began to develop the full meaning of their outlines, she all at once appeared in the new and startling phase of a rare model of incipient womanhood. Her hair, thick and flowing, was of a softened brown tint, which yet was distinct from that cognate hue, abrun (a-brown) or auburn, a shade suggestive of red. Her complexion was clear and pure, though not of that brilliant pink and white often associated with delicacy of constitution. A profile, delicately cut as if to be the despair of