My fellow-people, let me, in conclusion, congratulate you on having a Governor once more as is a Governor. Oh, there is life in the old land yet, and by and by we'll transport them black Republicans into the African desert, and put 'em to teaching Hottentots the right of suffrage. Winter Davis could then find a field of labor sufficient for the miserable remnant of his declining years. He is the winter of our discontent, and we want to get rid of him. BILL ARP (_On Hampton's Election_) November Thirtieth Yon marble minstrel's voiceless stone In deathless song shall tell, When many a vanquished age hath flown, The story how ye fell; Nor wreck, nor change, nor winter's blight, Nor Time's remorseless doom, Shall dim one ray of glory's light That gilds your deathless tomb. THEODORE O'HARA (_From "The Bivouac of the Dead"_) _General Patrick R. Cleburne killed at Franklin, Tenn., 1864_ December ICICLES AT THE SOUTH The rain on the trees has ceased to freeze; ('Twas molded with quaint device) The bent boughs lean, like cimeters keen, In scabbards of shining ice. 'Neath frozen cloaks the pines and oaks Are stooping like Druids old,-- And the cedars stand--an arctic band-- Held in the clutch of cold. Through the outer gloom the japonicas bloom, With the lustre of rubies bright-- Like blossoms blown from a tropic zone,-- A marvellous land of light! WILLIAM HAMILTON HAYNE December First THE FIRST SNOW-FALL The Fir-tree felt it with a thrill And murmur of content; The last dead Leaf its cable slipt And from its moorings went; The selfsame silent messenger, To one that shibboleth Of Life imparting, and to one, The countersign of Death. JOHN B. TABB December Second The avengers whose lives he had attempted, whose wives and children he had devoted to the hideous brutality of insurgent Africans, spared him all indignities, even moral torture. PERCY GREG (England) _John Brown hanged, 1859_ December Third The Black and Tan Convention met December 3, 1867, in our venerable and historic capital to frame a new constitution for the Old Dominion. In this body were members from New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Maine, Vermont, Connecticut, Maryland, District of Columbia, Ireland, Scotland, Nova Scotia, Canada, England; scalawags, or turn-coats, by Southerners most hated of all; twenty-four negroes; and in the total of 105, thirty-five white Virginians, from counties of excess white population, who might be considered representative of the State's culture and intelligence. MYRTA LOCKETT AVARY _James Rumsey (1787) makes successful trial trip of the steamboat designed after the model of 1784, then witnessed by George Washington and others_ December Fourth A BIT OF RECONSTRUCTION ORATORY