"Buxton has sufficient fleshly timber to make two or three Wilberforces. He is six feet and a half in height, though rather slender than robust. What a formidable leader of the anti-slavery cause in appearance! We always felt delighted to see him rise in his seat in Parliament to address the House, for his towering form literally caused his pro-slavery opponents to 'hide their diminished heads.' He is a very good speaker, but not an orator: his manner is dignified, sincere, and conciliating, and his language without pretence. But he has hardly decision, energy, and boldness enough for a leader. His benevolent desires for the emancipation of the colonial slaves led him to accede to a sordid compromise with the planters, and he advocated the proposition to remunerate these enemies of the human race, and to buy up wholesale robbery and oppression, in opposition to the remonstrances of the great body of English abolitionists, and it furnishes a dangerous precedent in the overthrow of established iniquity and crime throughout the world. The results of the bargain do not (January, 1836) reach Mr. Buxton's anticipations.... Still, aside from this false step, Mr. Buxton deserves universal admiration and gratitude for his long-continued, able and disinterested efforts, amidst severe ridicule and malignant opposition, to break every yoke and set the oppressed free." * * * * * President Nathan B. Young, of the Florida Agricultural and Mechanical College, has kindly directed our attention to the following facts which appeared in an article in the _Tampa Tribune_, showing how adoption of the Thirteenth Amendment was effected: "How the vote that made the Federal amendment abolishing slavery was polled in the house of representatives on January 26, 1863, was told to a representative of _The Tribune_ yesterday by the reading clerk of that congress--now a Florida winter resident and nearing ninety years of age. "A change of two votes would have defeated the amendment; and urgent business kept one man from being present to cast his vote against the measure, so it is seen that history came near being made another way that memorable day. "The story was told, with all the vigor and freshness of a man just from the existing scenes and actions, by E. W. Barber, editor of the Jackson (Mich.) _Daily Patriot_, now at Crooked Lake, happy in the summer of Florida's winter. Mr. Barber was reading clerk for the thirty-eighth, thirty-ninth and fortieth congresses, from December, 1863 to 1869; and he is today the only official of that body who is living. He will be ninety years old on the third of July, coming, and is wonderfully preserved, all except his leg. Indeed he laughingly declared that he would have been a dead tree if he had not been pruned of a dead limb! _Tells of Memorable Day_