The part played by the Virginia springs in the political and social life of "the States lately in rebellion," is to a traveller most interesting. The attraction of these springs to Southerners has been in times past, and is still, largely due to the fact that the South has, properly speaking, no other watering-places. Seaside resorts there are none worth mention, from Norfolk down to Mexico, and there are but few points of the long, level, dull, and sandy coast-line which are not more or less unhealthy. Suspicion on this point even hangs around the places in Florida now frequented by Northerners for the sake of the mild winter temperature. But oven if the sea-coast were healthy, it is in summer too hot to be attractive, and offers no relief to persons whose livers and kidneys have got out of order in the lowlands. These naturally seek the hills for coolness, and they go to the sulphur springs of Virginia because the sulphur waters are very powerful and efficacious in their effects on people afflicted with what the doctors call "hepatic troubles." But then they never would or could have gone from the Southern seaboard to places so far off if it had not been for the inestimable negro. The extent to which he contributed to the rapid pushing out of the scanty white population of the slave States to the Mississippi has never, I think, received due attention. He robbed pioneering, indeed, at the South of most of the hardship with which it is associated in the Northern mind--I was going to say discomfort as well as hardship, but this would be going too far. To the Southern planter, however, who could go West with a party of stalwart negroes to do the clearing, building, ploughing, and cooking and washing, the wilderness had but few of the terrors it presented to the Northern frontiersman. He was speedily provided with a very tolerable home; not certainly the kind of home which the taste of a man as well off at the North would be satisfied with, but a vastly better one than any new settler in the Northwestern States ever had. The springs in the Virginia mountains became popular a century ago, and were greatly resorted to in much the same way. They were remote and in the woods, but, owing to slavery, they swarmed from the very first with servants who could not "give notice" if they did not like the place, or felt lonesome.