The fact is, however, that they are in this respect like the rest of the human race. Time has done for their hearts and heads what it has done for the old Virginia battle-fields. There was not in 1865 a fence standing between the Potomac and Gordonsville, and but few, if any, undamaged houses. When I passed Manassas Junction the other day there was a hospitable-looking tavern and several houses at the station; the flowers were blooming in the yard, and crowds of young men and women in their Sunday clothes were gathered from the country around to see a base-ball match, and a well-tilled and well-fenced and smiling farming country stretched before my eyes in every direction. The only trace of the old fights was a rude graveyard filled, as a large sign informed us, with "the Confederate dead." All the rest of the way down to the springs the road ran through farms which looked as prosperous and peaceful as if the tide of war had not rolled over them inside a hundred years, and it is impossible to talk with the farmers ten minutes without seeing how thoroughly human and Anglo-Saxon they are. With them the war is history--tender, touching, and heroic history if you will, but having no sort of connection with the practical life of to-day. Some of us at the North think their minds are occupied with schemes for the assassination and spoliation of negroes, and for a "new rebellion." Their minds are really occupied with making money, and the farms show it, and their designs on the negro are confined to getting him to work for low wages. His wages are low--forty cents a day and rations, which cost ten cents--but he is content with it. I saw negroes seeking employment at this rate, and glad to get it; and in the making of the bargain nothing could be more commercial, apparently, than the relations of the parties. They were evidently laborer and employer to each other, and nothing more. The state of things on two farms which I visited may serve as illustrations of the process of regeneration which is going on all over Virginia. They are two hundred miles apart. On one of two thousand acres there were, before the war, about one hundred and fifty slaves of all ages. The owner, at emancipation, put them in wagons and deposited them in Ohio. His successor now works the plantation with twelve hired men, who see to his cattle, of which he raises and feeds large herds. His cultivation is carried on on shares by white tenants. He has an overseer, makes a snug income, and spends a good part of his winters in Baltimore and New York. He laughs when you ask him if he regrets slavery. Nothing would induce him to take care of one hundred and fifty men, women, and children, furnishing perhaps thirty able-bodied men, littering the house with a swarm of lazy servants, and making heavy drafts on the meat-house and corn-crib, and running up doctor's bills.