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amphitheatre saluted it with five thousand human voices, and the battlements replied with two hundred guns. How men's hearts cannonaded their breasts! How the joyful blood frolicked in our veins! The fallen honor of the nation was upraised! Straining eyes looked up through tears at the ensign fluttering in the clouds, and grateful hearts sent their thanksgivings to the heavens above. Rent and tattered was the banner, yet amid all its gashes not a star had been stricken out-happy omen that, despite the nation's wounds, not a State shall be lost! A full hour was passed in a merry clamor of patriotism before the jubilant throng could compose themselves for the oration. Finally, Mr. Beecher arose and set his strong voice into a struggle against a sea-breeze that kept whisking his locks and flapping his manuscripts, and threatened at first to wrestle him down, but the man who conquered a Liverpool mob was not to surrender to an east wind. Manly, wise, and eloquent was the speechof which, good readers of The Independent, judge ye, for I here enclose it, word for word. But no speech could rise to the height of that occasion: what could, except the flag itself? How wonderful are the ways of that Providence who cast down the nation's flag at Sumter till it should touch the lowly slave of the Carolinas, that it might rise again, and lift him with it to Liberty and Equality.

Charleston is a city of desolation-recalling our early school-book pictures of the gaunt remains of Thebes or Nineveh. It looks the skeleton of its former self. Ten acres are strewn with the ruins of fine houses, brought to ashes by fire-brands of the rebels-in some places not one stone left upon another, while here and there a solitary wall or gable end stands a tell-tale of the general destruc

tion. Of the buildings that remain, nearly half are crippled with gaping wounds from General Gillmore's angels

of the swamps.

What havoc that marksman made! Six miles off, he would sight a gun at the rattlesnake's nest, and crack an egg at every shot! Generally a shell would strike a roof, pass downward slant-wise through two or three stories, and come out through the wall--sometimes making a hole big enough to drive a horse through! Eighteen new windows were thus made in the Charleston Hotel; and the Bank of South Carolina was broken a dozen times after its original bankruptcy. In one of the churches a projectile knocked away eight of the ten commandments, leaving these twain: "Thou shalt not steal;" "Thou shalt not commit adultery "but there was no need of cracking these, for they were broken in Charleston long ago.

Calhoun's grave, spared by missiles, has been hacked by relic-seekers. I have no sympathy with hammerers at tomb-stones. The dead have a right to undisquieted ashes. As my own chief relic of fallen Babylon, I chose to pluck a handful of clover which I found growing among the ruins of Secession Hall.

Gentlemanly, uncertain Governor Aiken's house remains untouched-yet despoiled inside by his own act; for, fearing that the shells would break into his winecellar, he sent into the country his unpurchasable three thousand bottles of old Madeira, and his elegant silver plate; and Sherman's thirsty soldiers found the wine and drank it; and an esthetic negro was discovered in the woods frying bacon on the Governor's silver tray! So the negroes now constitute the first families.

How they turned out on Citadel Square to welcome

William Lloyd Garrison and his fellow agitators, escorting us to our hotel by a procession a mile in length, of men, women, and children, unconscious of the curse of Ham, and singing Glory Hallelujah. And how grand were the meetings in Zion's church-a great edifice crowded three times with a congregation of three thousand of the happiest human beings whom we ever saw compacted into one place-each successive meeting outrivalling the other in beauty of spirit.

On the morning of departure, the grateful blacks followed us to the wharf, where one of their number, a true orator, waving a flag in one hand, and clasping his two little children in the other, exclaimed with a sudden inspiration of eloquence, "O men of the North, you now see why I love this flag: it makes my children mine, who never were mine before!" All ears tingled at that speech!

Arm-laden with flowers, the gifts of a hundred hands. as we passed through the crowd, we made our parting speeches from the quarter-deck; and as the vessel glided into the stream, the same dark-faced orator knelt at the wharf's edge, holding up the flag in one hand, and pointing fixedly at it with the other-making himself a statue of patriotism—a beautiful and affecting tableau--the last sight we saw of that strange-fated city, whose great men have been humbled and whose lowly have been exalted.

Outward bound, and whither? The Arago returning without us, the swift Suwo Nada (unimpeded by her Japanese name) was to wing us southward to Florida, that we might pluck ancient mosses in St. Augustine. Little did we think, while one flag was rising to the peak at Sumter, how all flags would sink the next day to halfmast! Like an unpredicted eclipse was the awfulness

of the gloom. Pleasure withered out of our thoughts and fell a dead leaf, frost-bitten. Straightway our prow plunged homeward-bound. And now on this third sorrowful day since the great shock, it seems as if we were bearing in our sepulchral ship the good man's murdered body, and must hasten to the shore to lay it sacredly in the greenest of graves. Yonder stretches the familiar coast that in one hour more will terminate our clouded voyage. O stricken country!-darkened at noonday, wrapped in the shadow of death, clothed with a funeral pall into what grief shall we find thee cast down! May the God of the Pilgrims choose the hour of thy mourning to give thee His benediction of Liberty and Peace!

THE WHITE FEATHER.

HE decree of a council," said Cotton Mather, "hath no more force than there is force in the reason of it." The National Committee of the

Republican party have just issued to the American people an address which, with sorrow, we pronounce repugnant to the moral sense of those American citizens who are inflexibly determined not to compromise Impartial Suffrage. The country is in too critical a condition, the safety of Southern loyalists is too greatly imperiled, the peace and order of the future are too gravely threatened, to permit this address to go forth as representing, as pledging, and particularly as binding, the radical party.

For eighteen months, the daily topic of men's talk has been the reconstruction of the Union. Unanimity of opinion does not prevail. Opposing plans divide the nation into opposing parties, and subdivide parties into opposing sections. The Republican party is divided between the advocates of re-admission without securing the negro's political rights, and the advocates of re-admission only after a guarantee of Impartial Suffrage. At the first trumpet in this war of debate, we took our place under the banner of Equal Rights. We joined the cause not to desert it, not to betray it, not to compromise it, but to fight for it till the victory. It is a sacred cause; the cause of liberty and justice; the cause of honor, magnanimity, and charity; the cause of peace and good will. The no

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