f whiskey and tobacco; a sombre-looking
guard-house, bristling with armed men, who usher forth to guard the
fears of tyranny, or drag in some wretched slave; a dilapidated "Court
House," at the corner, at which lazy-looking men lounge; a castellated
"Work House," so grand without, and so full of bleeding hearts within; a
"Poor House" on crutches, and in which infirm age and poverty die of
treatment that makes the heart sicken--these are all the public
buildings we can boast. Like ominous mounds, they seem sleeping in the
calm and serene night. Ah! we had almost forgotten the sympathetic old
hospital, with its verandas; the crabbed looking "City Hall," with its
port holes; and the "Citadel," in which, when our youths have learned to
fight duels, we learn them how to fight their way out of the Union.
Duelling is our high art; getting out of the Union is our low. And, too,
we have, and make no small boast that we have, two or three buildings
called "Halls." In these our own supper-eating men riot, our soldiers
drill (soldiering is our presiding genius), and our mob-politicians
waste their spleen against the North. Unlike Boston, towering all bright
and vigorous in the atmosphere of freedom, we have no galleries of
statuary; no conservatories of paintings; no massive edifices of marble,
dedicated to art and science; no princely school-houses, radiating their
light of learning over a peace and justice-loving community; no majestic
exchange, of granite and polished marble, so emblematic of a thrifty
commerce;--we have no regal "State House" on the lofty hill, no
glittering colleges everywhere striking the eye. The god of slavery--the
god we worship, has no use for such temples; public libraries are his
prison; his civilization is like a dull dead march; he is the enemy of
his own heart, vitiating and making drear whatever he touches. He wages
war on art, science, civilization! he trembles at the sight of temples
reared for the enlightening of the masses. Tyranny is his law, a
cotton-bag his judgment-seat. But we pride ourselves that we are a
respectable people--what more would you have us?

The night is chilly without, in the fireplace of the antiquary's back
parlor there burns a scanty wood fire. Tom has eaten his supper and
retired to a little closet-like room overhead, where, in bed, he muses
over what fell from Maria's lips, in their interview. Did she really
cherish a passion for him? had her solicitude in years past some