nerve, and every nerve excites a whole
muscular system in reflex action.

I remember an amusing incident which took place while I was on picket at
Port Royal. Complaints began to come in against a certain neighboring
superintendent, an ex-clergyman, whose demeanor was certainly not
creditable to his cloth, but whose offences would have seemed slight
enough in the old plantation times. Still they were enough to exasperate
the people under his charge, and the ill feeling extended rapidly among
the black soldiers, many of whom had been slaves on that very island. At
last their captain felt it necessary to interfere. "Has it ever occurred
to you, my dear Sir," he one day asked the superintendent, "that you are
in some danger from these soldiers whom you meet every day with their
guns in the picket paths?"--The official colored and grew indignant. "Do
you mean to say, Sir, that your men are forming a conspiracy to murder
me?"--"By no means," returned the courteous captain. "I trust you will
find my soldiers too well disciplined for any such impropriety. But you
may not have noticed that the regiment has at present exceedingly poor
guns which often go off at half-cock, so that no one can be held
responsible. It was but the other day that one of our own officers was
shot dead by such an accident,"--which was unhappily true,--"and
consider, my dear Sir, how very painful"----"I understand you, I
understand you," interrupted the excited divine, putting spurs to his
horse. It was a remarkable coincidence that we never heard another
complaint from that plantation.

It was this new-born sensitiveness that brought to so sudden a close the
attempted apprenticeship of the British West Indies. Cochin, the wisest
recent critic, fully recognizes this connection of events. "Either the
regulations were incomplete, or the masters failed in their observance,
or such failures were not repressed, so that the slaves were in many
places maltreated and mutinous. In proportion as the moment of freedom
approached, some broke loose prematurely from their duties, others
aspired prematurely to their rights. Patience long delayed is easier
than patience whose end is approaching; it is at the last moment that
one grows weary of waiting."

The best preparation for freedom is freedom. It is of infinite
importance that we should avail ourselves of the new-born self-reliance
of the freedmen while its first vigor lasts, and guard against
sacrificing those