the recall of Maximilian,
who, deserted finally by his foreign abettors, was defeated and as a
prisoner shot by the Mexicans, June 19, 1867.

The Atlantic cable was laid from Valentia Bay in Ireland to Heart's
Content, Newfoundland, one thousand eight hundred and sixty-four miles,
and the line from New York to the latter place built in 1856, a distance
of one thousand miles, making in all, as keen mathematicians will see,
two thousand eight hundred and sixty-four miles.

A very agreeable commercial treaty with China was arranged in 1868.

Grant and Colfax, Republicans, succeeded Andrew Johnson in the next
election, Horatio Seymour, of New York, and Frank P. Blair, of
Missouri, being the Democratic nominees. Virginia and Mississippi had
not been fully reconstructed, and so were not yet permitted to vote.
They have squared the matter up since, however, by voting with great
enthusiasm.

In 1869 the Pacific Railroad was completed, whereby the trip from the
Atlantic to the Pacific--three thousand and three hundred miles--might
be made in a week. It also attracted the Asiatic trade, and tea, silk,
spices, and leprosy found a new market in the land of the free and the
home of the brave.

Still flushed with its success in humorous legislation, Congress, on the
30th of March, 1870, passed the Fifteenth Amendment, giving to the
colored men the right to vote. It then became a part of the
Constitution, and people who have seen it there speak very highly of it.

Prosperity now attracted no attention whatever. Gold, worth nearly three
dollars at the close of the war, fell to a dollar and ten cents, and the
debt during the first two years of this administration was reduced two
hundred million dollars.

Genuine peace reigned in the entire Republic, and o'er the scarred and
shell-torn fields of the South there waved, in place of hostile banners,
once more the cotton and the corn. The red foliage of the gum-tree with
the white in the snowy white cotton-fields and the blue-grass of
Kentucky (blue-grass is not, strictly speaking, blue enough to figure in
the national colors, but the author has taken out a poetic license which
does not expire for over a year yet, and he therefore under its
permission is allowed a certain amount of idiocy) showed that the fields
had never forgotten their loyalty to the national colors. Peace under
greatly changed conditions resumed her vocations, and, in the language
of the poet,--

"There were