A skilled artisan in the employment of the local authorities had been for many days surveying and diagramming, until a certain area of the old plantation remote from the mansion was arranged in geometrical figures, scientifically corespondent to each other, and there were curves and angles artistically precise. If the reader will place before him a miniature flag of the Turkish empire, the alignment of the tenements of the negroes will be seen, the concave line of the crescent indicating the position of the modest little houses of the freedmen, and the star the position of the stately mansion of Mr. Alexander Wiggins, a former slave of Colonel Seymour. Up to the time of this unblushing trespass upon the private domain of Colonel Seymour, and indeed afterwards, the negroes, like rodents, had burrowed in colonies in old dank cellars and where ever else they could find rest and shelter. This unhappy condition, post-dating the surrender at Appomattox, had a demoralizing effect upon them. They became spiritless and languid, or else vicious and vindictive. They felt that freedom was an illusion, an ignis fatuus that they had been recklessly pursuing, that lured them further into an impenetrable morass. In the excited state of their ignorant minds they had been indulging feverish and extravagant projects; chimerical notions of wealth and aggrandizement, and again like inert bodies they would drop lifelessly into the very depths of despair. It is impossible just now for the most active imagination to conceive a condition of human society more wretched. The sympathies of the old masters were moved; their humanity shocked; their very hearts grieved at the injustice done under the direction of the freedman's bureau in this violent and forced state of things. "An outrage," exclaimed the Colonel, "long matured, maliciously devised, and boldly perpetrated. Fanatics! you have emancipated by fraud and violence the slaves you affect to pity; you have doomed them to beggary, outlawry, prostitution and crime! You have filled them with discontent and made them to feel a chain they never felt before, and turned against them the care and consideration of their own masters, while your red squadrons of fanaticism are careering wildly through our plantations, so lately scourged by the hurricane of war; you the minions of a power confessedly omnipotent. Will you, too, destroy the Doric edifice of our morals, the Corinthian porticoes of our religion, stifle the denationalizing stream until it swells in great tides of blood? When the incendiary is lightning his torch, and the vultures are looking on with felon eyes, may the holy memories of the past give you pause." Thus spoke the old man in the eloquence of high-wrought feeling, for his country; for the poor negroes who, like bats and owls, were peopling dens and holes of darkness in this "land of the free and home of the brave."