iumphs of "suvverin
grace," and concerning himself most with the aesthetic beauties of its
"sperimental terms," yet duty compels him to state that while Brother
Jones and his militant hosts were pressing hard upon the enemy from their
entrenched position, their campaign was far from embodying all the gospel
conditions. Though we could wish the sentence blotted out after we had
written it, it behooves us to say, in plain words, that sins both of
omission and commission soiled their robes, and wrought, or should have
done so, a languishing effect on their hosannas. The grassy cotton-fields
and rioting pumpkin vines testified to the former, while the _commission_
department of the offence, with such a paraphrase of that word as may be
effected by a slight transposition of accent, was directed with most fatal
precision of aim at the henneries and "piggeries" of the neighboring white
trash. So constant and regular were their visits to the haunts of the
feathered domestics, that the fashion of noting absentees from roll-call
became obsolete; and a full chorus of grunts was so foreign to the morning
habits of the pig-pen, that such an outburst in that quarter must have
affected the nerves of the strongest. Indeed, that division of the
pale-faced settlers whose springtime felicity depended largely on this
class of commissaries, had arrived at such a desperate strait that, in
convention assembled, it was resolved to retrench, and, if we must write
it, their "artifice" of retrenchment was levelled at Brother Jones and his
"band of robbers," as they were politely termed. The scheme "hit upon,"
and the success which followed it, may be gathered from the following
scene:

That period of the night equally removed from the departed and the coming
day, had accomplished its fiftieth revolution, and now hung fire over the
eighteenthly of the most eloquent discourse that was ever flattened out
over the crowns of an equal proportion of unsuspecting listeners for the
same number of times. The cries of the stricken arose from every quarter
of the vast audience, and hundreds of the slain had submitted to that
elongating process by which their contorted frames were made to do duty
for the greatest number of "squatter sovereigns." One brother arose to
testify, in a series of whoops, to the pungency of "de brudder's
doctorin'," and immediately went to bed to a mass of excruciating hurts on
the outskirts of the assembly. A sister, racked by the "a