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When we cultivated the fields the last time, mules and hands were almost hidden from sight by the thrifty plants. Some of them were so high that one on horseback could not reach the topmost leaves, and, on a single one, I counted one hundred and sixty bolls. The green and swelling bolls began rapidly to burst, and their fleecy whiteness, in contrast with the purple blooms and rich foliage, made the broad fields still more beautiful.

Aside from the peculiar annoyances and dangers to which we were exposed, the reader should not get the impression that the management of one hundred and fifty freedmen just escaped from slavery was a matter of unalloyed enjoyment. Far from it. It required "the patience of Globe" (Job), as my overseer constantly asserted, to get along with them. It was a matter of the first importance to obtain their confidence by just and honest treatment; and in no case to abuse it. Without this nothing could be done.

Our camp in the ravine near the new fort had meanwhile grown into quite a village, of which the manager's house, a plantation-mill to grind corn for the weekly rations, and an enormous stable, were the conspicuous buildings. The tents had gradually given place to cabins, around many of which the freedmen cultivated little gardens, and made accommodation for the traditional pigs and poultry. As regiments were ordered away from Port Hudson they secured many of the small buildings which spring up like mushrooms in a military camp; and on Saturday afternoons, when I gave them teams for the purpose, I several times saw quite a street of little houses perched bodily on the wagons, moving slowly to our quarters, like Birnam wood to Dunsinane. They called our little village Yanktown. General McNeill, restless under the inactivity at Port Hudson, used in vain every effort to have his force increased so as to begin aggressive operations. Suddenly and unexpectedly he was relieved from command.

Dismayed at the gloomy prospect,

and thoroughly convinced that I could not gather the crop without protection, I repaired to the headquarters of the cavalry in New Orleans. Aside from my own interests, which, of course, could not be urged, there were many reasons why a cavalry regiment should be sent to Port Hudson. I used every argument in my power, but could get no encouragement whatever, and returned in more perplexity than ever. Cotton had already advanced to a dollar and a half per pound; the unprotected fields were whitening for a splendid harvest that bade fair to be a very cup of Tantalus.

At this time there happened to arrive at Port Hudson a company of independent loyal scouts, who had joined General Banks' army during the first Opelousas campaign. Among them were Creoles, Cagians, the descendants of the old Acadians, and a few mulattoes. They belonged mainly in the Attakapas region of Louisiana. Many a Federal soldier will recall the daring feats of this band of loyalists, to whom rebel bullets were not half so fatal during the war as rebel rage has been since its close. Here to-day and there tomorrow, now making rendezvous in one of the dense swamps of the Teche or the Cortableau, then falling, like lightning, upon some rebel detachment or dashing into a rebel town, watching every Confederate camp, learning every movement, eluding all pursuit, their history would furnish some of the most thrilling episodes of the war in Louisiana. Their connection with the army in 1864 was merely nominal, and the commanding general at Port Hudson, who was powerless to protect my interests, advised me to employ this wellarmed and well-mounted company to guard my plantations. However serviceable in keeping off guerillas, they could not have resisted any considerable body of the enemy. There was the same objection as existed to arming my freedmen. But I did not abandon the idea.

In a situation of terrible suspense, 1 happened one day to be walking on the

levée at Baton Rouge, when I noticed a large steamboat covered with colored troops, whose fine cavalry equipments, especially their new Spencer carbines, attracted my attention. To my incidental question as to the destination of his regiment, Colonel Alexander replied that it was the Fourth Colored Cavalry, for Port Hudson.

I felt like embracing him.

A few hours afterward the men encamped on the little plateau between Port Hudson and Yanktown. Seeing no horses, I inquired when they were to arrive, and was struck speechless with astonishment to hear that the regiment not only had no horses, but that there were none for them in the department.

The situation was growing desperate. Retiring to my tent to think over once more the problem which had so often elated me with hope, and suddenly baffled with disappointment, my eyes fell upon a special order of General Banks, in the newspaper, to press into the cavalry service the available horses in the city of New Orleans. After a few days' delay, which seemed as many weeks, the horses arrived, but notwithstanding my anxiety and disappointment, I could not help shedding tears of laughter at the very sight of them. What but a passion for conic sections could have led the officer in charge to select such miserable hacks! To mount men upon them seemed a mockery and a snare. Had the choice been left to the worst rebel sympathizers in New Orleans, they would have picked out for us just such sorry Rosinantes. True, the equine population of New Orleans had already stood two or three similar drafts, but on my next visit to the city I could see no diminution in the number of fine turnouts on the Shell Road. However, the men were mounted, and a double force pushed out to the old picket-line.

With a light heart I once more rode over the splendid fields for so long a time practically deserted. The impatient freedmen were also ready, with bags strapped over the shoulder, and huge baskets wherein each kept the

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cotton picked, to be weighed in the field at midday, and again at nightfall, so that extra care and labor could be compensated. Twice a-day large plantation-wagons, filled to the top with fleecy seed-cotton, conveyed their precious loads to Yanktown, where it was dried upon scaffolds, and, as there were no gins at Port Hudson, was packed in bulk for shipment to New Orleans.

Not waiting for a large lot, I hurried down to arrange for the selling of the crop, and offered four bales at auction. It was the 3d of September-a day not soon to be forgotten by cotton-buyers in New Orleans, for on that day the price touched the very highest point. Never, before nor since, have I seen such an excited crowd at the great cottonmart-such wild, feverish haste to buy. The bulls were in high carnival, jubi lant, defiant. My small lot being new cotton, and the first of the season, reach ed the highest figure. It started at one dollar and fifty cents per pound; "six

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ty," seventy,"
""eighty," "ninety

in quick succession-" ninety-one "-"two"-" and a half "-" I'm positively giving it away," shouted the auctioneer-"last call "-and down fell his hammer at one dollar ninety-two and a half cents per pound, or over eight hundred dollars per bale.

The Iberville landed me at Port Hudson early the next morning. Riding out again over the magnificent fields, a slight calculation assured me that I ought to make six hundred bales. Was it not in fact already made? Just after the raid at Mt. Pleasant I would gladly have accepted ten thousand dollars for the whole crop. Had any one now offered me three hundred thousand dollars for the same it would have been promptly refused. Why not? It seem ed good for half a million.

Who has not studied one of those little charts made to represent the fluctuations of gold during the war by means of an irregular line drawn as an artist, with a single dash across the soft blue atmosphere of a painting, may outline the summits of lofty mountains? That crooked line is a simple matter,

but terribly suggestive. The defeats and victories, the ebbs and flows and surges of public opinion during those eventful years, what other barometer so well indicated them? The holder of gold on the 30th of June, 1864, could hardly have described his sensations. He would not have cared to describe them a few hours afterwards.

When travelling in the East, I one night asked our dragoman to interpret for me one of those marvellous storiesarabesques of imagination woven upon some tradition of Scripture or of patriarchal life—with which the Bedouins still love to draw out the long hours of the night under the dreamy stars of Palestine. It referred to King Solomon, who from small beginnings, according to the story-teller, had become so enormously rich that it required a hundred camels to carry the keys wherewith to lock his treasures. A little fly, sent by Allah, entered into his brain, and rapidly increasing in size, soon caused such intolerable pain that he could get relief only by having his head constantly pounded with mallets. Finally, a swarm of flies burst forth that soon turned into innumerable worms and utterly consumed his possessions. "Behold,” said Allah, "what an insignificant thing hath caused thy ruin!"

Within twenty-four hours after my arrival from New Orleans I noticed, in a remote portion of one of the fields, a little cluster of cotton-plants whose leaves were strangely perforated. Dismounting, I could find upon the plants only a few slender, greenish worms, with gray stripes on the back, and perhaps an inch in length. "Dey is grass-wums, sare," said the freedman with me, who claimed great wisdom in plantationcraft. "'Cause, you see, dey don't doubles 'emself up and jump, like the ginwine cotton-wums, when I'se done touch't 'em." There was plenty of excellent grass, but the preference of the worms for cotton-leaves was as unmistakeable as their appetite was voracious.

I directed the chief-overseer to leave off picking cotton on the morrow, and

be ready with all hands for this new emergency. Although the worms multiplied enormously during the next few days, they were still confined to a single field. In this vermicular warfare we gave no quarter. The least of the one hundred and fifty freedmen must have slain his myriads, but I could not see that any impression whatever was made upon the number of living worms. We had outlived raids and surprises, the loathsome small-pox, the drought and rain: what strategy could avail against these new enemies, more vindictive than rebels, and multiplying like forest-leaves in the spring!

Some one had told me that the armyworm would not in its advances cross a ditch. Most of my freedmen had helped throw up the rebel earthworks of Port Hudson; and they went to work with a will upon this new defence against the creeping host. Notwithstanding the terrible heat, we soon completed a ditch, entirely cutting off the affected portion from the rest of the plantations. Vain delusion! Uncle Toby's famous parallels and salients would have been quite as effective.

It was positively dreadful to watch those crawling armies. They covered the plants and the earth. Nor was it necessary to see them. A dull metallic sound, very like the falling of rain on the leaves, indicated their devouring presence. And the smell of them! With a sort of breathless wonder, as in the terrible conflicts of the elements, one can look upon the destruction of his property by consuming whirlwinds of flame, by engulfing waves, or the blasts of a tornado-but to see it devoured by loathsome worms!

After several days there was still one field, of about fifty acres, in which not a worm was to be seen, nor one of those black moth-like flies that deposit their eggs on the under side of the cottonleaves, and then wrap themselves up in a single leaf, as in a shroud, to die. I telegraphed to the city for thirty barrels of coal-tar. It arrived the next morning. The freedmen, provided with basins, buckets, and skillets, deposited

a little coal-tar near the foot of every plant. Should this bucolic engine prove effective, I would become a believer in Stephen H. Branch's vermicular theory of success.

The next morning I rode out to see the result. There were the worms more numerous than ever, unchecked in their devouring march by the dreadful heat and the vile odors wafted by the south wind. "Sirocco of the Desert " I have ever since regarded as a weak and commonplace figure of speech.

"Innocent worms!" do you say?

When witnessing the worse than gladiatorial combats to be seen in a drop of water, where microscopic monsters devour each other, and in reflecting that, perhaps, all the bloody campaigns in history, all the tortures of martyrs and burnings of heretics, have caused less suffering than we thoughtlessly inflict, every meal, upon millions of animalculae exquisitely sensitive to pain, it may be, in proportion as they are minute, I may have indulged for the worm in my path a sentiment of pity. But what a grim and ghastly satire upon such mere sentiment was the sight

of those fields stripped of their beauty, like forests in winter, and consumed as by the breath of a demon!

Still the loss was not complete. Like Sennacherib's hosts, the armies of worms disappeared even more suddenly and mysteriously than they came. Excepting the almost mature cotton-bolls, they left not a green thing behind. Had they come a month earlier, there would have been no cotton-a month later, the crop would not have been injured. As it was, the hot sun shining directly upon the swelling bolls, opened them nearly all at once; and the great fields quickly became white as the driven snow. They usually remain green until the tender plants are killed by the frost, and the picking then continues until Christmas. We gathered two hundred and fifty-six bales, which, at the enormous price of cotton, brought one hundred and thirty-five thousand dollars. The entire expense of making the crop, including losses and revenue taxes, was about one hundred and five thousand dollars. But the physical and mental wear and tear of such a cottoncampaign was positively dreadful.

YOUTH AND AGE.

YEARS make not age; the head may gleam in white
Yet youth twine verdure round the heart; below
The drift may smile the flowers; the genial glow
Of Spring-tide melting even the Winter's might.
White hairs may come in youth; the heart be old;
No blossoms deck the early-frozen mould.
Keep the heart young! the conscience crystal-clear !
So shall sweet Summer smile throughout the year!
Faint not because of trouble! let the sun

Be present to thy thought, though clouds be black!
To-morrow haply on the present's track

Shall glide, and radiance and thy life be one!

Were pleasure but thy handmaid all thy hours,

Her smile would pall! the couch soon sickens piled with flowers!

LEAVES FROM THE JOURNAL OF A POOR MUSICIAN.

In the hilly suburbs of the quaint old city of Aschaffenburg, there stood, twenty years ago, a grim and stately stone building. This building was the celebrated "Rheinhardt Acad emy." Here I was imprisoned, in the year 1848, in company with over a hundred other youths between thirteen and twenty years of age. Within walls, the severe and unchanging discipline of daily study was interrupted only by occasional exercise in the enclosed play ground attached to the building, and the yearly four-weeks' vacation. Our knowledge of the world outside was limited to the glimpses caught through the narrow framework of our win dows; and many a youthful imagination kindled at the distant panorama of the river Main, with its ever-shifting motion and light. Here, a dry and monotonous existence poetized to two young lads by one of those impassioned friendships peculiar to school-life, and which has the couleur de rose of Love, without its suspicions or its pangs. Herman Ehrthal, who was three years my senior, had completed his mathematical studies, and was almost exclusively occupied in the musical department when I entered the Academy. Many a time, after school-hours, have I crouched outside his door to listen to the delicious harmonies that fell from his fingers, and which seemed to interpret for me all the bright dreams of that future which lay in its glowing perspective beyond the present cold and cheerless life. It was here he found me one night, in tears, and took me to his heart. From that moment we understood each other. Through the six following years, he was color and sunshine to me in the shade of those grim old walls. In 1854 he left the Academy and went to Vienna, where he pursued his musical studies exclusively during a residence of six years. From Vienna he went to London, where he resided five years. In 1865 he returned to Germany, and informed his friends that he should leave the following month for America. Before he sailed, we agreed mutually to keep journals, and, upon reunion, exchange them, so that each might possess the record of the other's experiences, objective and subjective, during separation Two years after his departure for the New World I joined him there. When we met, the Journals were exchanged according to promise. His now lies before me. The few leaves which I have selected for publication are precisely as I find them, except in the substitution of fictitious names. The story of these pages is neither dramatic nor sensational. The reader will find none of those startling events which quicken circulation-none of those dark mysteries which provoke shudders and pique expectation. To those who enjoy the intense shadow and intricacy of plots à la Wilkie Collins, the possible-to-every-one history of Herman Ehrthal will prove but tame amusement. But to those born to music, these pages will hold a peculiar interest; for, enclosed in the simple framework of this simple story, is woven the subtle, subjective experiences peculiar to the artist-life. That finer discrimination in music which is born not so much of acquired as instinctive knowledge, will be passed by unheeded by many. That rapturous enthusiasm which is as irrepressible to the artist-nature as song to birds, and which in its most eloquent expression seems to him but a feeble counterpart of that which burns within him, will be smiled at by this same many as puerile rhapsody. But those whose souls have kindled at the same fires, will read aright the language, and will feel with the artist its entire inadequacy to its sublime theme. To these I offer these pages.

October 24th.-Well, here I am home again! Home! a narrow, carpetless room; cot bed, rude chair, and washstand; in one corner, a trunk; in the other, an upright piano. My apartment is certainly not elegant, yet it is not without ornamentation; witness: four excellent engraved portraits of the following composers, Handel, Beethoven, Bach, and Schumann; the rosewood

piano left in my charge by H— till his return, and on the window-sill the bunch of roses I bought to-day of the pale little girl at the corner. Alacka-day! my efforts to gain work have been so far unsuccessful, and a dolce far niente life is my present prospect. What a weary day this has been! Will it ever be thus ? Must I barter my holy Muse, whose white garment I am un

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