A Major-General, in full uniform, occupied the desk and was addressing the crammed audience of negroes in a plain, nervous, forcible manner. It was an odd sight, but General Saxton certainly adorns the pulpit. Ladies would call him a handsome man; and his black hair and luxurious English whiskers and mustache would be their especial admiration. He looks—to judge of his intellect by his face and head—narrow, but intense; not very profound in seeing the right, but energetic in doing it when seen; given to practice, rather than theory; and, withal, good and true. He is the first regular army officer who was found willing to undertake this work of caring for and superintending the freedmen; and he has done it faithfully, under all manner of slights and obloquy from brother officers, who thought his work unworthy of West Point. And yet he undertook it, not from any special love of the negro, but because he was ordered. “I would have preferred being in the field,” he said simply, last night, “but I was ordered to do this thing, and I have tried to do it faithfully, till the Government gave me something else to do. I was educated in its school and for its service, and I thought it my business to do whatever it required.” The Government has rarely been so fortunate in selecting its agents for tasks that required peculiar adaptability. The audience was a study. Near the pulpit sat a coal-black negro, in the full uniform of a Major of the army, with an enormous regulation hat—be sure there was no lack of flowing plume, or gilt cord and knots—disposed on the table beside him. At every emphatic sentence in the General’s speech he shouted, “Hear, hear,” and clapped his hands, with the unction and gravity of an old parliamentarian. Near him were two others in uniform, one a mulatto, the other scarcely more than a quadroon, and both with very intelligent faces, and very modest and graceful in their bearing. One was a First Lieutenant, the other a Major.