"You of course hear many complaints that the blacks will not work?"

"Yes, and they are true in certain cases: they will not work for such wages as their late owners are willing to give; in other words, they will not work for less than nothing. But when they have encouragement they work very well, in their fashion, -which is not the Yankee fashion, certainly, but the fashion which slavery has bred them up to. They have not yet learned to appreciate, however, the binding character of a contract. It is a new thing to them. Besides, the master too often sets them bad examples by failing to keep his own engagements. He has been in the habit of breaking his promises to them at his convenience; and now he finds fault that they do not keep theirs any better. The masters have not yet learned how to treat their old servants under the new conditions. They cannot learn that they are no longer slaves. That is one great source of trouble. On the other hand, where the freedman receives rational, just, and kind treatment, he behaves well and works well, almost without exception. I expect a good deal of diffi culty soon. The negroes have in many places made contracts to work for a part of the crop; now when the corn comes to be divided, their ideas and their master's, with regard to what 'a part' of the crop is, will be found to differ considerably. I was not an anti-slavery man at home," he added; " and I give you simply the results of my observation since I have been in the South."

"What do you think would be the effect if our troops were withdrawn?"

"I hardly know; but I should expect one of two things: either that the freedmen would be reduced to a worse condition than they were ever in before, or that they would rise in in

surrection."

The landlord wished me to go and look at his corn. It was certainly a noble crop. The tops of the monstrous ears towered six or eight feet from the ground; the tops of the stalks at least twelve or fourteen feet. He maintained that it would average fifty bushels (of shelled corn) to the acre. I thought the estimate too high.

SCENE OF THE DECISIVE CONFLICT.

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"Good corn," said he, "measures finely; sorry corn porely. And consider, not a spoonful of manure has been put on this ground fo' fou' years."

"But the ground has been resting; and that is as good as manure."

"Yes; but it's mighty good soil that will do as well as this. Now tell your people, if they want to buy good land cheap, hyer's their chance. I've got a thousand acres ; and I'll sell off seven hundred acres, claired or timber land, to suit purchasers. It's well wo'th twenty dollars an acre; I'll sell for ten. It a'n't fur from market; and thar 's noth'n' ye can't raise on this yer land."

Of all his thousand acres he had only about fifteen under cultivation. His cornfield was not as large as it appeared; for, running through the centre of it, like a titanic furrow, were Lee's tremendous intrenchments. These few acres were all the old man had been able to enclose. There was not another fence on his farm. "I had over ten thousand panels of fence burnt up for me during the wa'; over eighty thousand rails."

"By which army

-?"

"Both: fust one, and then the other. Our own troops were as bad as the Yankees."

Afterwards, as we rode away from the tavern, Richard H. Hicks gave me the following succinct account of the landlord:

"He used to be a heavy coon-dog. He had fifty head o' darkeys. He would n't hire 'em, and dey lef'. Now he has nobody to wo'k de land, he 's got a light pocket, and so he 's a mind to sell."

Riding west from the Court-House, and striking across the fields on the right, we passed McCool's house, in a pleasant shady place, and reached the scene where the eight days' fighting culminated. Of the woods, thinned and despoiled by the storm of iron and lead, only a ghostly grove of dead trunks and dreary dry limbs remained. Keeping around the western edge of these, we came to a strange medley of intrenchments, which it would have required an engineer to unravel and

understand. Here Grant's works had been pushed up against Lee's, swallowing them as one wave swallows another. Nowhere else have I seen evidences of such close and desperate fighting. For eight days Grant had been thundering at the gates of the Confederacy; slowly, with fearful loss, he had been pressing back the enemy and breaking through the obstructions; until here at last he concentrated all his strength. Each army fought as if the gods had decreed that the issue of the war depended upon that struggle. And so indeed they had: the way to Richmond by this route, so long attempted in vain, was here opened. The grand result proclaimed that the eight days' battles were victories; that the enemy, for the first time on his own chosen ground, had met with ominous defeat. Inconceivable was the slaughter. Here two red rivers met and spilled themselves into the ground. Swift currents from the great West, tributaries from the Atlantic States and from the Lake States, priceless rills, precious drops, from almost every community and family in the Union, swelled the northern stream which burst its living banks and perished here. Every state, every community, every family mourned.

But behind this curtain of woe was the chiselled awful form, the terrible front and sublime eyes, of the statue of Fate, the nation's unalterable Will. Contemplating that, we were silenced, if not consoled. Every breast-that of the father going to search for the body of his dead son, that of the mother reading the brief despatch that pierced her as the bullet pierced her dear boy, that of the pale wife hastening to the cot-side of her dying husband, nay, the bleeding breasts of the wounded and dying, while yet they felt a throb of life — thrilled responsive to Grant's simple, significant announcement

"I propose to fight it out on this line, if it takes all summer." It took all summer, indeed, and all winter too; but the result had been decided at Spottsylvania.

The Rebel armies had invaded the North and been driven ingloriously back. Many times we had started for Richmond and been repulsed. But at length we were not repulsed: the overwhelming wave poured over the embankments.

"CHINCAPINNIN'."

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Such thoughts or rather deep emotions, of which such thoughts are but the feeble expression - possess the serious tourist, who stands upon that field furrowed and ridged with earthworks and with graves, beside that grove of shattered and shrivelled trees. A conscious solemnity seems brooding in the air. If the intrenchments could speak, what a history could they disclose! But those sphinx-like lips of the earth are rigid and still. Even the winds seem to hush their whispers about that scene of desolation. All is silence; and the heart of the visitor is constrained to silence also.

Upon a hacked and barkless trunk at the angle of the woods, in the midst of the graves, was nailed aloft a board bearing these lines:

"On Fame's eternal camping-ground

Their silent tents are spread,

And glory guards with solemn round

The bivouac of the dead."

A thick undergrowth had sprung up in the woods. I noticed, stooping among the bushes along by the breast works, an old woman and two young girls.

"Dey 're chincapinnin'," said Richard.

But I observed that they gathered the nuts, not from the bushes, but from the ground. Curiosity impelled me to follow them. The woman had a haversack slung at her side; one of the girls carried an open pail. They passed along the intrenchments, searching intently, and occasionally picking something out of the dirt. Pressing into the bushes, I accosted them. They scarcely deigned to look at me, but continued their strange occupation. I questioned them about the battle; but their answers were as vague and stupid as if they then heard of it for the first time. Meanwhile I obtained a glance at the open mouth of the heavily freighted haversack and the halffilled pail, and saw not chincapins, but several quarts of old bullets.

Wandering along by the intrenchments, I observed the halfrotted fragments of a book on the ground. They were leaves from a German pocket Testament, which doubtless some soldier

had carried into the fight. I picked them up, and glanced my eye over the mildewed pages. By whom were they last perused? What poor immigrant's heart, fighting here the battles of his adopted country, had drawn consolation from those words of life, which lose not their vitality in any language? What was the fate of that soldier? Was he now telling the story of his campaigns to his bearded comrades, wife and children; or was that tongue forever silent in the dust of the graves that surrounded me? While I pondered, these words caught my eye:

"Die du mir gegeben hast, die habe ich bewahret, und ist keiner von ihnen verloren." "Those that thou gavest me I have kept, and none of them is lost."

I looked round upon the graves; I thought of the patriot hosts that had fallen on these fearful battle-fields, of the households bereft, of the husbands, fathers, brothers, and sons, who went down to the Wilderness and were never heard of more; and peace and solace, sweet as the winds of Paradise, came to me in these words, as I repeated them,—

"None of them is lost, none of them is lost!