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"Negro labor mostly. It was hard to get any other here. I did n't own slaves, but hired them of their masters. Only the poorest hands were usually hired out in that way; I could seldom get first-class hands; yet I always found that by kind treatment and encouragement I could make very good laborers of those I had. I get along still better with them now they are free."

"Do you use horses?"

"No; mules altogether. Two mules are equal to three horses. Mules are not subject to half the diseases horses are. They eat less, and wear twice as long."

I found farms of every description for sale, around Richmond. The best land on the James River Bottom could be bought at prices varying from forty to one hundred dollars an acre. I remember one very desirable estate, of eight hundred acres, lying on the river, three miles from the city, which was offered for sixty dollars. There were good buildings on it; and the owner was making fences of old telegraph wire, to replace those destroyed during the war.

CHAPTER XXIV.

IN AND AROUND RICHMOND.

IF temples are a token of godliness, Richmond should be a holy city. It has great pride in its churches; two of which are noteworthy.

The first is St. John's Church, on Church Hill, — a large, square-looking wooden meeting-house, whose ancient walls and rafters once witnessed a famous scene, and reëchoed words that have become historical. Here was delivered Patrick Henry's celebrated speech, since spouted by every schoolboy, "Give me liberty or give me death!" Those shining sentences still hang like a necklace on the breast of American Liberty. The old meeting-house stands where it stood, overlooking the same earth and the same beautiful stream. But the men of that age lie buried in the dust of these old crowded church-yards; and of late one might almost have said that the wisdom of Virginia lay buried with them.

On the corner of Grace Street, opposite my hotel, I looked out every morning upon the composite columns and pilasters, and spire clean as a stiletto, of St. Paul's Church, with which are connected very different associations. This is the church, and (if you enter) yonder is the pew, in which Jeff Davis sat on Sundays, and heard the gospel of Christ interpreted from the slave-owners' point of view. Here he sat on that memorable Sabbath when Lee's dispatch was handed in to him, saying that Richmond was lost. The same preacher who preached on that day, still propounds his doctrines from the desk. The same sexton who handed in the dispatch glances at you, and, if you are well dressed, offers you a seat in a good place. The same white congregation that arose then in confusion and dismay, on seeing the President go out, sit

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quietly once more in their seats; and the same colored congregation looks down from the nigger gallery. The seats are still bare, the cushions that were carried to the Rebel hospitals, to serve as mattresses, having not yet been returned.

Within an arrow's shot from St. Paul's, in the State Capitol, on Capitol Square, were the halls of the late Confederate Congress. I visited them only once, and found them a scene of dust and confusion, emblematical. The desks and seats had been ripped up, and workmen were engaged in sweeping out the last vestiges of Confederate rule. The furniture, as I learned, was already at an auction-room on Main Street, selling under the hammer. I reported the fact to Mr. C———, of the Union Commission, who was looking for furniture to be used in the freedmen's schools; and he made haste to bid for the relics. I hope he got them; for I can fancy no finer stroke of poetical justice than the conversion of the seats on which sat the legislators of the great slave empire, and the desks on which they wrote, into seats and desks for little negro children learning to read.

It was interesting, by the light of recent events, and in company with one who knew Richmond of yore, to make the tour of the old negro auction-rooms. Davis & Co.'s Negro Bazaar was fitting up for a concert hall. We entered a grocery store, a broad basement room, with a low, dark ceiling, supported by two stout wooden pillars. "I've seen many a black Samson sold, standing between those posts; and many a woman too, as white as you or I." Now sugar and rice were sold there, but no more human flesh and blood. The store was kept by a Northern man, who did not even know what use the room had served in former years.

A short ride from the city are two cemeteries worth visiting. On one side, Hollywood, where lie buried President Monroe and his doctrine. On the other side, Oak Wood, a wild, uncultivated hill, half covered with timber and brush, shading numerous Confederate soldiers' graves. Here, set apart from the rest by a rude fence, is the "Yankee Cemetery," crowded with the graves of patriot soldiers, who fell

in battle, or died of slow starvation and disease in Richmond prisons; a melancholy field, which I remember as I saw it one gusty September day, when wild winds swept it, and shook down over it whirling leaves from the reeling and roaring trees.

Lieut. M, of the Freedmen's Commission, having invited me to visit Camp Lee, about two miles from the city, came for me one afternoon in a fine large carryall, comfortably covered, cushioned, and carpeted.

"Perhaps you will not feel honored," he remarked, as we rattled up Broad Street, "but you will be interested to know that this is General Robert E. Lee's head-quarters' wagon. You are riding on the seat he rode on through the campaigns of the last two years. Your feet are on a piece of carpet which one of the devoted secessionists of Richmond took up from his hall-floor expressly to line the General's wagonbottom, little thinking Yankee boot-soles would ever desecrate it! After Lee's surrender, this wagon was turned over to the quartermaster's department, and the quartermaster turned it over to us." I was interested, indeed; I was carried back to those sanguinary campaigns; and I fancied I could see the face of him sitting there where I sat, and read the thoughts of his mind, and the emotions of his heart, in those momentous nights and days. I imagined the plans he revolved in his brain, shut in by those dark curtains; what he felt after victory, and what after defeat; the weariness of body and soul; the misgivings, the remorse, when he remembered his treason and the folly of Virginia, for he certainly remembered them in the latter gloomy periods, when he saw the black cloud of doom settling down upon a bad and failing cause.

Camp Lee, formerly a fair ground, was the conscript camp of the Confederacy. I had been told many sad stories of young men, and men of middle age, some of them loyal, seized by the conscript officers and sent thither, as it were to a reservoir of the people's blood, whose stream was necessary to keep the machinery of despotism in motion. I paced the grounds

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where, with despairing hearts, they took their first lessons in the art by which they were to slay and be slain. I stood by the tree under which deserters were shot. Then I turned to a very different scene.

The old barrack buildings were now the happy homes of a village of freedmen. Groups of barefooted and woolly-headed negro children were at play before the doors, filling the air with their laughter, and showing all their ivory with grins of delight as I passed among them. The old men took off their caps to me, the wise old aunties welcomed me with dignified smiles, and the younger women looked up brightly from their ironing or cooking as I went by. The young men were all away at their work. It was, with few exceptions, a self-supporting community, only about a dozen old or infirm persons, out of three hundred, receiving aid from the government.

A little removed from the negro village was a cottage formerly occupied by Confederate officers.

"In that house," said the Lieutenant, "is living a very remarkable character. You know him by reputation, -, formerly one of the ablest writers on 'De Bow's Review,' and considered the great champion of slavery in the South."

"What the author of?" a somewhat celebrated book in its day, and in the latitude for which it was written; designed to set forth the corrupt and perishable nature of free societies and progressive ideas, and to show that slavery was the one divine and enduring institution.

"The very man. of the government. and he draws rations

He is now a pauper, living on the bounty The rent of that cottage is given him, of the Relief Commission. He will be glad to see you; and he has two accomplished daughters you will be glad to see."

Accordingly we called upon him; but, declining to enter the house, we sat under the stoop, where we could look across the desolate country at the sunset sky.

Mr., an emaciated, sallow, feeble old man, received us affably, and talked with us freely on his favorite topics. He had lived to see the one divine and enduring institution