established, before it, once so beautiful and bright, shall go down and down forever below a horizon of blood. They may like wrestlers in the arena bring us to our knees, but never sir, shall they lay us on our backs. Let us alone, and the dews and the rains and the sunshine of heaven, (the only creatures of God left by them in friendship with us) shall give to our blood-stained fields moisture and fertility, and time and labor and God's blessing shall cover the land with verdure, with cottonfields and gardens, pastures and meadows. They promised us peace, and it came with the mutterings of a tornado. In our vain efforts to compromise the situation we turned our backs upon the past, hallowed as were its memories. We had ceased to remember the execrations of fanatics, even the 'league with the devil, and the covenant with hell.' "We did all this and more, after we had passed fire-scathed through an ordeal whose voice was storm and whose movement was earthquake, which swept from us every visible substance; so that in our last and extremest agony we were forced to cry aloud, like Francis at Pavia, "All is lost save honor." We gave the government our parole; we hammered our swords into plow-shares and pruning-hooks; we pitched our tents upon the fire-blasted lands where once had been our homes, and with axe and mattock and blade and plow began to cut away brambles and bushes and cultivate our fields; and when we believed that we were secure in the enjoyment of our rights of persons and property, the authors of reconstruction swept down upon the beleaguered South like Hyder Ali upon the Carnatic, and left scarcely a vestige upon which to hope, or from which to rebuild, except our worn-out lands and our own splendid manhood and womanhood. States were despoiled of their resources, towns and cities were battered and burned; the angel of death had crossed every threshhold, and three hundred thousand of the flower and chivalry of the land were lying in soldiers' graves. Our public institutions were languishing unto death; from centre to circumference there were outlawries, assassinations, conflagrations; and our people looked into the faces of each other and in their helplessness asked what other calamities are reserved for us and our children. They seized upon four million slaves and hurled them like immense projectiles against our civilization. And to conclude, sir, for I find I am getting excited, in this catastrophe our hopes were stayed upon the honest men of the North, like you, sir, and our noble, patriotic women, like you, my dear miss," bowing with boyish gallantry to Alice. "The women of the sixties are more than heroines in the storm-swept crisis--they are a revelation in the flesh. What Arria was to Pætus, what Natalia was to Adrian, what Gertrude was to Rudolph, what Helen, the Jennie Dean of the 'Heart of Midlothian,' was to Tibbie, what Prascovia was to the Russian exile, our self-sacrificing women are to us.