Reference, by Believers in the Transmigration of Souls, to Mr. Pierce for its Proof.—His real and apparent Age.—The Slave Colossal Figure bestrides the Presidential Harbor.—How the New President rode in between its Legs, and cast out a curious Anchor.—An Antediluvian Cabinet.—Still Times expected.—Sudden Freshet.—Douglas breaks the Missouri Dike.—Bitter Waters over the Land.—Alarm among the Elderly Gentlemen, and how quieted by J. Davis.—Alarm North and South not quieted.—The African Outlook towards the North Pole.—The Power of Douglas illustrated from his Scotch Namesake and Proverb.—What Warriors rushed to our Flanders.—The Blow on the Head of Sumner and Slavery from Brooks’s Cane.—The Dred Scott Essays.—American Africanization.—An Exploring Party in the Interior.—Discovery of an Extinct Race, and of Fremont.—Undiked Waters not strong enough to float Douglas into a Nomination.—Buchanan in the Dock.—The Know-Nothings make a neat little Present to a Polite Gentleman. Believers in the doctrine of transmigration of souls point to Franklin Pierce for its triumphant demonstration. Although by ordinary reckoning but forty-nine years old when, in March, 1853, he came out of New Hampshire to be President of the United States, he must have lived—so they assert—somewhere through several previous existences and brought along with him the last time the cherished notions of the first. Certainly he was as much of an anachronism as a two-handled plough, dragged by a yoke of oxen, contrasted with a steam one driving its hot shares through dissolving acres, an undecked Roman trireme rowed against an iron-breasted monitor armed with the heaviest modern gun, or an old-fashioned scythe in comparison with a mower. His ideas of government were scant for a good-sized town, and of slavery so patriarchal, that a Red River planter might have taken several lessons from him with great profit. Slavery at that time, like the colossal statue of Apollo at Rhodes, stood with its two feet widely apart. Its right was planted in the commercial cities of the North, covered with a huge stocking of Northern manufacture; its left, spread out like Sambo’s, all over the Gulf States, was carefully enwrapped with raw cotton. Between its wide-spread legs Mr. Pierce, like an ancient mariner, sailed into the harbor, and cast out an anchor, forged at Baltimore, or it may be at Nineveh, with an inscription on its best fluke, “No agitation about slavery.” It might as well have been inscribed, “No more thinking.” He asked several elderly gentlemen to help him have a good quiet time: William L. Marcy, with the portfolio of State; James Guthrie, incubating the snug little Treasury nest; Jefferson Davis, with the appropriate red-lettered War rifle; Caleb Cushing, holding the Attorney-General’s fool’s-cap brief; Robert McClelland, bringing an oaken inlaid table for the Interior; and James Campbell, an old-fashioned letter-weigher.