That sonorous mellowness of unalloyed laughter we shall never hear again. But never mind,—let it pass! CHAPTER XXVIII. Yes, let it pass. There was music in that laughter, doubtless, but it cost us too dear. I think we Virginians[1] are agreed as to that,—more than agreed,—yet we cannot bring ourselves to look as others do, upon the state of things which rendered it possible. As one man, we rejoice that slavery is dead; but even the victors in the late struggle—the magnanimous among them, at least—will hardly find fault with us if we drop a sentimental tear, as it were, upon its tomb. A reasonable man is glad that an aching tooth is well out of his mouth; but to the autocratic dentist who should pull it out by force, his gratitude would not be boisterous; and then, after all, it leaves a void. But cheer up, brother Virginians, listen to your Bushwhackerish bard while he chaunts you a lay. He would have his say; but he will be good and kind. He would not willingly bore you; and hence, ever thoughtful and considerate, he serves up his rhetoric in a separate course. Skip this chapter, then, if you will. You will find the story continued in the next. Yes, it is all true enough, I admit. It was but the other day, so to speak, that the first shipload of negroes was landed on the shores of a continent peopled by a race which, after all has been said, remain the most interesting of savages, and who, if not heroes, have easily become heroic under the magicians’ wands of Cooper and of Longfellow. That shipload and its successors have become millions; while the genius of a Barnum scarce suffices to bring together enough Redskins to make a Knickerbocker holiday. The descendant of the naked black, whose tribe, on the Gold Coast, still trembles before a Fetish, rustles, beneath fretted ceilings, in the robes of a bishop; while some chief of the kindred, perhaps, of Tecumseh, shivers on the wind-swept plains, under the fluttering rags of a contract blanket. His half-naked squaw hugs her pappoose to her bosom, and flees before the sabres of our cavalry; but her more deeply-tinted sister struts, beflounced, the spouse of a senator. In one word, the race which the Anglo-Saxons found on this continent remained free, and perished; the people they imported and enslaved, multiplied and flourished. I do not feel myself the Œdipus to solve this riddle of modern morals; but, with my people, I fail to see the consistency of Victor Hugo[2] for example, who could whine over the fate of John Brown,—hanged for an attempt to achieve the liberty of the negro through murder,—but who, when Captain Jack stood at the foot of the gallows, made no sign. Captain Jack, he too, through murder, sought to maintain his ancestral right to independence—nay, existence—and a few acres of wretched lava-beds. The distempered fancy of the first saw, as he gazed upon the corpses of the fellow-citizens of Washington, of