”DEAR SIR: Your welcome letter I received this morning. It gave me great pleasure, though I did not need it for my happiness. For it has pleased God so graciously to stand by me in this fiercest attack of my life that if every friend in the world had abandoned me I should not have been alone. I need not tell you, who have both known and taught to others, that Christ has a peace which, surpassing all other experience of earthly joy, requires for its possession an unusual earthly trial. In that peace I have rested as in God’s pavilion.... “I never expected to stand up in the publicity which God has been pleased to draw me into, and faithfully to declare His truth against the interests of commercial and political circles, and not be visited with this wrath. “But they shall neither destroy me nor daunt me nor silence me, for my God is greater than their devil. I will work yet harder and speak more plainly for every blow they deal. May God repay your kindness to me a thousand-fold! ”H. W. BEECHER.” We find no word from Mr. Beecher concerning the election of this year, but an article immediately following shows that he kept his eye upon the main issue, and that none of its humorous any more than its sorrowful features escaped him. It was entitled “Degraded into Liberty”: “A Southern gentleman _en route_ for Texas brought to New York eight slaves, to be shipped hence by one of our ocean-going steamers. The birds of the air informed the Abolitionists of the facts, and it was not long before a writ was served upon the whole chattel-gang, and they were hauled up before Judge Paine to show cause why they should not be doomed to freedom. The cruel inhospitality of New York was never more manifest. These innocent fellow-beings, blessed by being born slaves, and not painfully educated for it, as Northern Southerners are; having had all the manifold mercies which make a Virginia slave so much better off than a free factory-girl in Massachusetts; having grown up in the indulgence of those hilarious dances and in the practice of those songs which make plantation life perfectly paradisaical, they were on their way to that land waving with sugar-cane and cotton-plants, where, hoe in hand, they were to while away the brilliant hours with gentle dalliances with loam and clay—when lo! they were suddenly arrested.