follow me.' 'Yes, my father,' replied the brokenhearted youth, I shall shortly follow you. For, indeed, I feel that I can't live long.' And his melancholy anticipation was fulfilled in a manner more dreadful than is implied in the mere extinction of life. On seeing his father in the hands of the executioner, and then struggling in the halter, he stood like one transfixed and motionless with horror. Till then he had wept incessantly; but soon as he saw that sight, the fountain of his tears was stanched, and he never wept more. He died insane; and in his last moments often called upon his father in terms that brought tears from the hardest heart."

Two-thirds of a century after these heroes were gathered to their fathers, we, in 1860, make the fol lowing eloquent extract from a late speech of Senator Hunter, of Virginia. In speaking of the possibility of the efforts of the Republicans to overthrow the government proving successful, he said:

"Sir, in that event, the accusing voice of human history will ring through all the ages to impeach them at the bar of posterity for having destroyed the noblest scheme of constitutional liberty which the wisdom of man has ever devised; and upon that fearful issue each of the succeeding generations of men will record its verdict of guilty against them. Their own descendants will heap reproaches upon the names of those who disappointed them of the destiny which would have been the richest inheritance that one generation could bequeath another. But when it is asked upon what view of the constitution, upon what consideration of religion or philanthropy; upon what calculation of interest, gene

ral or sectional, the fatal deed was done, where will the satisfactory answer be found, and who shall arise in that day to defend their name from the foul reproach?

"Mr. President, when I think of what it is that may be destroyed by this narrow spirit of sectional hate and bigotry, I turn away from the contemplation with a feeling of almost indignant despair. But I will not, as yet, despair of my country. I will yet hope that the great army of Northern Democrats and conservatives will arise in the might of a noble cause, and expel the intruders from the seat of power. I will trust in the influence of truth, whose empire is felt in every human heart when once it has touched it. I will put my faith higher yet-in Providence, for it cannot be that God will permit such a scheme of government as this, freighted, as it might have been, with the highest hopes of humanity, to be wrecked in the wild orgies of madmen and fanatics."

As soon as Judge Heyward died, and was buried in the venerated grave-yard of his ancestors, his wife, in disgust of the world and all its vanities, retired to the third story of her palatial mansion, where she remained excluded from all society save a few intimate friends, until she died, some twenty or thirty years afterwards. These few friends* and relatives whom she allowed to

* Mrs. Heyward was the bosom friend of the author's mother, who died not a great many years after the second war with Great Britain. She was so adhesive in her friendships, that where she loved the parent, she would love the children to the second and third generation. She therefore encouraged the orphans of this friend to visit her, and confide all their troubles to her; and her generosity to them was constantly frustrated by their knowledge that they must not accept presents from a

visit her in her private boudoir, were made to understand that she expected them, as a point of etiquette, to leave in one hour, which was all the time she devoted each day to receiving company. She lived entirely alone in this ghostly big house, and dismissed her numerous retinue of black servants every night. There was, however, a deep-sounding bell at the head of her bed, that communicated with the servant-hall, which is usually, in the country in South Carolina, some twenty feet from the master's house. Her only amusement, or rather recreation, was knitting for her grandchildren and gentlemen friends-an art that she carried to the most beautiful perfection; and a bookseller in Charleston had orders to send to White Hall every new work in the market, for her affluent library.* She person who was so heedless of gifts as to cause her children “to rejoice that her head was fastened indissolubly to her shoulders, or she would give away that too, with its great wealth of brain.” The author, in all her life, was never so happy as when allowed reverentially to listen to the sparkling conversational powers, and noble natural sentiments of this brilliant, imposing friend of her dead mother.

* "God be thanked for books. They are the voices of the distant past ages. Books are the true levellers. They give to all, who faithfully use them, the society, the spiritual presence of the best and greatest of our race. No matter how poor I am. No matter though the prosperous of my own time will not enter my obscure dwelling. If the sacred writers will enter and take up their abode under my roof, if Milton will cross my threshold to sing to me of Paradise, and Shakspeare to open to me the worlds of imagination and the workings of the human heart, and Franklin to enrich me with his practical wisdom, I shall not pine for want of intellectual companionship, and I may become a cultivated man, though excluded from what is called the best society in the place where I live."-CHANNING,

rode through her fields occasionally, and would ride eight miles to spend the day with her only daughter, Mrs. Parker; but this, too, she finally gave up.

It was too tantalizing to her admirers, who frequently took advantage of the etiquette to visit her one hour in her impregnable castle (where, high up towards the dome, she held her unique levees), to see by her expressive eagle eye that they must leave; for her great conversational powers, and deeply interesting, speaking countenance, her captivating wit, her withering sarcasm, and her erratic independence of thought and action, made her new every morning, and fresh every moment, to the appreciators of female genius and noble sentimentality. She particularly liked Mr. Wyndham, though he was not a genius; for who ever heard of a genius who was happy or rich, or contented or prosperous in the world? Indeed, if poets were not always in ecstasies of grief, joy, or despair, from some imaginary cause that their sickly sentimentalism, or largely developed nervous system is so fruitful in producing, their effusions would be too flat to find a market in the literary world.

Oh, how entranced with delight would Mr. Wyndham's children have been, had he succeeded in obtaining the hand of this far-famed Juno; but, no, he had become earnestly in love with the innocent, unimposing, little woodland nymph of Rugbyanna; and galloped round to Mrs. Heyward's every morning, to communicate his plans for his nuptials with his beautiful Matilda. In Mr. Wyndham's case, it was no mere figment of the imagination to be in love for he was profoundly, furiously, almost ridiculously in earnest, about the charms.

of his ideal; and every day that the conventionality of mourning for his dead wife, kept him disunited from the living Hebe, appeared an interminable age. Twelve months, however, now elapsing since he became a widower, and every temporality being arranged for his wedding, he was about starting for Rugbyanna to claim his bride, when the driver, old Mingo, came running up to the carriage to let him know that one of the negro men, in cutting down a piece of timbered land, had had a tree to fall on his legs, and though he was alive, they could not extricate him from his perilous confinement.

Mr. Wyndham sprang into the saddle of one of his out-riders, and running the horse to the spot where his faithful servant lay pinioned down in excruciating torture, he forgot everything else, except the desire to release him, and therefore throwing all his herculean strength, with his servants, against the fallen tree, succeeded, to their astonishment, in rolling it away, and extricating the poor sufferer; but from that hour, to the day of his death, he never recovered entirely from the wrenching strain of the back, that this adventure cost him. Indeed, he lay six months in bed from spinal disease; and must have died, but for the unwearied devotion of his servants, who never left him night or day. Old Liddy, his dead wife's maid, watched over him with the tenderness of a mother; and as soon as he was able to write, he forwarded to Miss M'Elroy, at Rugbyanna, a release from her engagement to him, as now there was every prospect of his being a cripple for life, even should he ever rise from his present bed of anguish.