'A lively lad and fleet team soon placed us at the gate, which the stage from the boat was just passing. The little rest and drive had greatly invigorated us, and we bravely pushed on to the summit, outstripping the heavy coach, and reaching the top of the mountain just as the red rays of the setting sun were flushing the hills with crimson. The hour was too late to risk the dark path through the wood, and we continued upon the main highway, making but one deviation down a stony road, and over Spruce Creek, until we reached the Laurel House, where the twilight was still lingering, and where we found our friends a little anxious.'
'I do not wonder,' said Aunt Sarah. 'Such vagaries are enough to keep a whole household in a chronic state of anxiety. And I really cannot see what you had gained!'
'I have only given you a simple statement of the facts,' replied Elsie; 'to know our feelings by the way, the delight we experienced, all we learned, including geography and topography, and the life and health we drank in at every step, you must take that very same walk.'
'More inscrutable mysteries!' returned Aunt Sarah.
'Yes,' said Lucy D----, 'inscrutable, and yet subtilely vivifying as the breath of their Author, the Great Architect of this glorious universe.'
All thoughtful minds are profoundly conscious that the problems of war are not the last and most important to be solved in our national affairs. It is clear enough that this great convulsion must end; and end, too, in the total extinction of that stupendous system of iniquity in the interests of which it was projected. President Lincoln's Proclamation of emancipation throughout rebeldom, and the recent order to enlist the slaves throughout the Border States in military service to the Government, emancipating all thus enlisted, whether slaves of loyal or disloyal masters, with the certainty that there is to be no cessation to the grand achievements of our arms short of the completest success, all conspire to assure us that the dreadful _disorder_ hitherto consuming our national vitals is to pass finally away in the convulsive _disease_ of its last throes, so distressing to us all. It being thus certain that this consecrated crime is to be dismantled, dishonored, and abandoned forever, the question is forced upon us: 'What is to be done with the negroes?' Some four millions of human beings, doomed to remorseless servitude, denied the static force of social law, forbidden by positive law the rights of education, through which alone are attained the culture and refinement of real manhood--these are the 'freedmen' just emerging from the most insignificant nonage to the sublime personality of citizenship in a Government of the people. Such being practically their attitude, what are the real demands and needs in the case?