I have all my life long been a true friend to the South. My connections, my interests, and my sympathies are all there, and there are those now in the ranks of this rebellion who are of my own blood; but I say, and I would to God that every lover of his country would say it with me, 'Make no peace with it until slavery is exterminated.' Slavery is its very bones, marrow, and life-blood, and you can not put it down till you have destroyed that accursed institution. If a miserable peace is patched up before a death-stroke is given to slavery, it will gather new strength, and drive freedom from this country forever. In the nature of things it can not exist in the same hemisphere with liberty. Then let every man who loves his country determine that if this war must needs last for twenty years, it shall not end until this root of all our political evils is weeded out forever. A short half-hour took us to the plantation, where I found the Colonel on the piazza awaiting me. After our greeting was over, noticing my soiled and rather dilapidated condition, he inquired where I had passed the night. I told him, when he burst into a hearty fit of laughter, and for several days good-naturedly bantered me about 'putting up' at the most aristocratic hotel in South Carolina,--the 'Mills House.' We soon entered the mansion, and the reader will, I trust, excuse me, if I leave him standing in its door-way till another month. THE LESSON OF WAR. Lex est, non poena, perire.--_Martial._ Ye warriors of the past, whose flashing swords Light up with fitful gleams the misty night Of half-forgotten eld, in fiery words Ye teach a truth 'twere well we read aright. God sends the gentle breeze to woo the flower, And stir the pulses of the ripening corn; He, too, lets loose the whirlwind's vengeful power To quench the plagues of foul stagnation born. And thus in love, sometimes disguised as wrath, He sends his hidden blessings in the storm, Which dashes down in its resistless path The hoar abuses that defied reform. When Cyrus ravaged fair Chaldea's plain, And mocked the strength of Babylon's haughty wall, The proud Assyrian's guilt had earned the chain, And man rejoiced to mark the oppressor's fall. And when, made drunk with power, the Persian lost The stern and simple virtues of his sires, His empire's ruin and his slaughtered host Kindled in Greece her world-illuming fires. Then Greece, her swift career of glory stayed, Exhausted by her madman's triumphs lay, Till Rome's protecting arm the loss repaid Of Corinth's sack and Pydua's fatal day. Imperial Rome! though crime succeeded crime As earth fell prostrate 'neath her giant tread, Still shall her subjects reap to endless time The priceless harvests by her wisdom spread.