old by him or his ancestors for 200 years.
According to him, that violent emancipation was ruin all round: in his
own case a great farm of happy dependants was destroyed, the inhabitants
all dead through disease and starvation, a vast estate once well tilled
reverted to marsh and jungle, and himself and his reduced to utter
poverty,--all mainly because Mrs. Beecher Stowe had exaggerated isolated
facts as if they were general, and because North and South quarrelled
about politics and protection. Mrs. Stowe, I hear, has learnt wisdom, as
I did,--and now like me does justice to both sides. There is no end to
extracts from my journals, if I choose to make them; but I think I will
transcribe four stanzas which I gave to Williams Middleton in February
1877, on my departure, as they bring together past and present:--

"Ancient schoolmate at Brook Green
Half a century ago
(Nay, the years that roll between
Count some fifty-eight or so),--
Oh, the scenes 'twixt Now and Then,
Life in all its grief and joys,--
Meeting Now as aged men
Since the Then that saw us boys!

"There's a charm, a magic strange,
Thus to recognise once more,
Changeless in the midst of change
Mind and spirit as of yore;
Even face and form discerned
Easily and greeted well,
While our hearts together burned
At school-tales we had to tell.

"Mostly dead, forgotten, gone,--
Few old Railtonites of fame
(Here and there we noted one),
Yet we find ourselves the same!
Sons of either hemisphere
We can never stand apart,
With to me Columbia dear
And my England in your heart.

"You, of good old English stock,--
I--some kindred of mine own
Pound themselves on Plymouth Rock,
Five times fifty years agone;
So, I come at sixty-six,
All across the Atlantic main,
With my kith and kin to mix,
And to greet you once again!"

I may here record that, accompanied by Middleton, I watched at an
alligator's hole with a rifle, but the beast would not come out, perhaps
luckily for me, if I missed a stomach shot; that I was prevented from
bringing down a carrion vulture, it being illegal to kill those useful
scavengers; that I caught some dear little green tree frogs; that I
noted how the rice-fields had become a poisonous marsh; that I noticed
the extensive strata of guano and fossil bone pits, securing some large