pread slavery over the finest cotton country on earth, under the
patronage of England, which hates slavery, but worships its results. The
future of Mexico it lies in the power of the American Union to decide,
and our armies are contending as much for Mexican freedom as they are
for American nationality.

* * * * *

A RAFT THAT NO MAN MADE.

I am a soldier: but my tale, this time, is not of war.

The man of whom the Muse talked to the blind bard of old had grown wise
in wayfaring. He had seen such men and cities as the sun shines on, and
the great wonders of land and sea; and he had visited the farther
countries, whose indwellers, having been once at home in the green
fields and under the sky and roofs of the cheery earth, were now gone
forth and forward into a dim and shadowed land, from which they found no
backward path to these old haunts, and their old loves:--

[Greek: Eeri kai nephele kekalummenoi oude pot' autous
Eelios phaeuon kataderketai aktinessin.]
_Od._ XI.

At the Charter-House I learned the story of the King of Ithaca, and read
it for something better than a task; and since, though I have never seen
so many cities as the much-wandering man, nor grown so wise, yet have
heard and seen and remembered, for myself, words and things from crowded
streets and fairs and shows and wave-washed quays and murmurous
market-places, in many lands; and for his [Greek: Kimmerion undron
demos],--his people wrapt in cloud and vapor, whom "no glad sun finds
with his beams,"--have been borne along a perilous path through thick
mists, among the crashing ice of the Upper Atlantic, as well as
sweltered upon a Southern sea, and have learned something of men and
something of God.

I was in Newfoundland, a lieutenant of Royal Engineers, in Major Gore's
time, and went about a good deal among the people, in surveying for
Government. One of my old friends there was Skipper Benjie Westham, of
Brigus, a shortish, stout, bald man, with a cheerful, honest face and a
kind voice; and he, mending a caplin-seine one day, told me this story,
which I will try to tell after him.

We were upon the high ground, beyond where the church stands now, and
Prudence, the fisherman's daughter, and Ralph Barrows, her husband, were
with Skipper Benjie when he began; and I had an hour by the watch to
spend. The neighborhood, all about, was still; the only men