Swept into the red gulf of all-consuming war, many of the unhappy gentlemen who had legislated against "the spirits in Alabama," became, during the ensuing five years, spirits themselves, and have doubtless realized the inestimable privileges which the communion they so rashly denounced on earth was calculated to afford to the inhabitants of the spheres. In other respects, the fatal prophecy has been too literally fulfilled. Many a regiment of brave men have marched out of the city streets of Alabama, only to return as unbodied souls, and to behold the streets grass-grown and deserted, and the thresholds which their mortal feet might never again cross, overspread with the moss of corruption and decay. Alabama has truly sat "as a widow, desolate." Her strength has been shorn, her beauty gone. No State has sent forth a greater number of brave and devoted victims to the war than Alabama; no Southern State has suffered more fearfully. May God and kind angels lift the war curse from her widowed head! The following extract from a letter, written by Mr. Adams, one of the witnesses of the above scene, to the author, in 1864, from New York, during a temporary sojourn there, will carry its own comment on the fulfilment of the fatal prophecy: "Now that my two poor boys are in daily danger of themselves becoming 'unbodied spirits,' Emma, I continually revert to that terrible prophecy of yours uttered in the assembly chamber at Montgomery. Heaven knows I was then so little prepared to expect war or any reasonable fulfilment of the doom, that I could only look to see some great pestilence, fire, or other sweeping calamity falling on poor Alabama. Last night, when I read in the _Herald_ of the sweeping extermination that had visited those two fine Alabama regiments, I could not help going to Mrs. Adams's desk, where she keeps the copy that young Waters made us of your prophecy, and reading it aloud to the whole company. "Our friend J. B., who was present, insisted upon seeing the date, and when he saw that it was January, 1860, they were all fairly aghast, and said if ever there was genuine prophecy it was contained in that paper." CLEARING AWAY THE FOG. An esteemed correspondent writes, "For several years I have been a reader of some of the treatises you have published in the interest of progressive thought, and have found much to admire and reread; yet an occasional paragraph containing the formula of orthodox theology, with its dogma of God and Jesus, interwoven into your sequences of argument, mystifies and perplexes my reason and judgment, and I indulge in much speculation regarding your exact position,--whether Christianity is to be vitalized and conserved by the discoverer of modern science, or the Bible dogmas and traditions reinterpreted to coincide with scientific method."