waste, disorder, and bloodshed inevitably attending a revolution like this, and you have a sum-total literally appalling. Could any people on earth tamely submit to spoliation so thorough and so fatal? The very Bengalese would muster the last man, and stake the last jewel, to avert it. In the last days of March, 1861, I was sent by President Lincoln on a confidential mission to Charleston, South Carolina. It was in its nature one of great delicacy and importance; and the state of the public mind in the South at that juncture made it one not altogether free from danger to life and limb, as I was rather roughly reminded before the adventure was concluded. Throughout the entire land was heard the tumult of mad contention; the representative men, the politicians and the press of the two sections were hurling at one another deadly threats and fierce defiance; sober and thoughtful men heard with sickening alarm the deep and not distant mutterings of the coming storm; and all minds were agitated by gloomy forebodings, distressing doubts, and exasperating uncertainty as to what the next move in the strange drama would be. Following the lead of South Carolina, the secession element of other Southern States had cut them loose, one by one, from their federal moorings, and "The Confederate States of America" was the result. It was at the virtual Capital of the State which had been the pioneer in all this haughty and stupendous work of rebellion that I was about to trust my precious life and limbs as a stranger within her gates and an enemy to her cause. Up to this time, Mr. Lincoln had been slow to realize or to acknowledge, even to himself, the awful gravity of the situation, and the danger that the gathering clouds portended. Certain it is that Mr. Seward wildly underrated the courage and determination of the Southern people, and both men indulged the hope that pacific means might yet be employed to arrest the tide of passion and render a resort to force unnecessary. Mr. Seward was inclined, as the world knows, to credit the Southern leaders with a lavish supply of noisy bravado, quite overlooking the dogged pertinacity and courage which Mr. Lincoln well knew would characterize those men, as well as the Southern masses, in case of armed conflict between the sections. Mr. Lincoln had Southern blood in his veins, and he knew well the character of that people. He believed it possible to effect some accommodation by dealing directly with the most chivalrous among their leaders; at all events he thought it his duty to try, and my embassy to Charleston was one of his experiments in that direction.