Just before he died, a friend called to ask after his condition. His reply was that he had a bad cold without any cough to suit it. And so, humor bubbling from his lips to the last, there passed away, on the 26th of May, 1827, the rarest humorist that Georgia, the especial mother of humorists, has ever produced. Judge Dooly had a humor that was as illuminating as it was enlivening. It stirred to laughter or it moved to tears, according as this wonderful man chose to direct it. A great deal of the humor that originated in Georgia has been printed in books. We find it in Judge Long-street's "Georgia Scenes," in Major Jones's "Travels," in Colonel Richard Malcolm Johnston's "Stories of Georgia Life," and in other volumes that have attracted public attention. But the best of it has been lost. It originated when the lawyers were riding about on horseback or in buggies from court to court, and tradition has only preserved a small part of it. SLAVERY AND SECESSION. The dispute over slavery, which had been going on for many years, grew furious in 1850; and its fury increased until, in 1860-61, it culminated in the secession of the Southern States from the Union. Some of those who have written the history of the secession movement contend that slavery had little or nothing to do with the matter; that the South seceded because the North had refused to grant her people their rights guaranteed under the Constitution. This is true as far as it goes; but the fact remains, that secession and the war grew out of the efforts of the abolitionists of the North, and those who sympathized with them, to keep slavery out of the Territories, and to prevent the new States then forming from becoming slave States. There is no doubt that these efforts were illegal and unconstitutional; and yet, in the minds of those who made them, constitutionality was not a sufficient excuse for slavery, which, whatever might be its political status, was morally wrong: that is to say, they believed that such a wrong as slavery could not be justified by paper constitutions and the like. Some of the more extreme abolitionists of the North were just as ready to secede from the Union that recognized slavery as the Southerners were to break up a Union whose constitutional guaranties meant nothing.