graphic picture of her own marvellous
advancement from utter obscurity to the platform of a public
lecturer, honored by her own race and applauded by their
oppressors. While we regret, as she says, that her experience
and that of Mr. Montgomery is exceptional, it is easy to
anticipate the harvest of such a sowing. The same culture--the
same courage on the part of the men and women who undertake to
advocate Republican doctrines in the South--the same
perseverance and intelligence on the part of those who are
earning their bread by the cultivation of the soil, will be
crowned with the same success. Violence, bloodshed, and murder
cannot rule long in communities where these resistless elements
are allowed to work. No scene in the unparalleled tragedy of the
rebellion, or in the drama which succeeded that tragedy, can be
compared to the picture outlined by Mrs. Harper herself, and
filled in by the ready pen of the rebel editor of the Mobile
_Register_:

MOBILE, July 5, 1871.

MY DEAR FRIEND:--It is said that truth is stranger than
fiction; and if ten years since some one had entered my
humble log house and seen me kneading bread and making
butter, and said that in less than ten years you will be
in the lecture field, you will be a welcome guest under
the roof of the President of the Confederacy, though not
by special invitation from him, that you will see his
brother's former slave a man of business and influence,
that hundreds of colored men will congregate on the old
baronial possessions, that a school will spring up there
like a well in the desert dust, that this former slave
will be a magistrate upon that plantation, that labor
will be organized upon a new basis, and that under the
sole auspices and moulding hands of this man and his
sons will be developed a business whose transactions
will be numbered in hundreds of thousands of dollars,
would you not have smiled incredulously? And I have
lived to see the day when the plantation has passed into
new hands, and these hands once wore the fetters of
slavery. Mr. Montgomery, the present proprietor by
contract of between five and six thousand acres of land,
has one of the most interesting families that I have
ever s