It is very amusing to hear the Southerners talk of arming their slaves. I often heard them do it in Florida. I have read such Richmond Congress debates as have transpired upon the subject. I do not believe that any important steps will be taken in the matter. I have known a master mad with fear, when he saw an old gun-stock protruding from beneath one of those dog-heaps of straw and sacking called beds, in the negro-quarters. The fact that it had been thrown away by himself, had no barrel attached to it, and was picked up by a colored boy who had a passion for carving, hardly prevented the man from giving the innocent author of his fright a round "nine-and-thirty." When I was in Florida, a peculiar set of marks, like the technical "blaze," were found on certain trees in that and the adjoining State westward. The people were alive in an instant. There were editorials and meetings. The Southern heart was fired, and fired off. There was every indication of a negro uprising, and those marks pointed the way to the various rendezvous. When they were discovered to be the work of some insignificant rodent, who had put himself on bark-tonic to a degree which had never chanced to be observed before, nobody seemed ashamed, for everybody said,--"Well, it was best to be on the safe side; the thing might have happened just as well as not." I do not believe that one thinking Southern man (if any such there be in the closing hours of a desperate conspiracy) has any more idea of arming his negroes than of translating San Domingo to the threshold of his home. I should like to see the negroes whom I knew most thoroughly intrusted with blockade-run rifles, just by way of experiment. Let me recall a couple of these acquaintances. * * * * * The St. John's River is one of the most picturesque and beautiful streams in the world. Its bluffs never rise higher than fifty or sixty feet; it has no abrupt precipices; the whole formation about it is tertiary and drift or modern terrace; but its first eighty miles from its mouth are broad as a bay of the sea, and its narrow upper course above Pilatka, where current supersedes tide, is all one dream of Eden,--an infinitely tortuous avenue, peopled with myriads of beautiful wild-birds, roofed by overhanging branches of oak, magnolia, and cypress, draped with the moss that tones down those solitudes into a sort of day-moonlight, and, in the greatest contrast with this, festooned by the lavish clusters of odorous yellow jasmine and many-hued morning-glory,--the latter making a pillar heavy with triumphal wreaths of every old stump along the plashy brink,--the former swinging from tree-top to tree-top to knit the whole tropic wilderness into a tangle of emerald chains, drooping lamps of golden fire, and censers of bewildering fragrance.