shared its hospitalities, received protection from their enemies, and
been esteemed as brothers, have turned like vipers and stung their
generous host, still it passed it heedlessly and was ever ready to do
as much in the future as it had done in the past. As genial as their
native clime, as generous as mortals could ever be, those who sought
the assistance of the people of the South would find them ready to
accord to the deserving, all that they desired. It was indeed a
glorious land; blooming with the loveliest blossoms of charity,
flowing with the tears of pity for the unfortunate, and resplendent
with all the attributes of mortal's noblest impulses. Gazing on the
past, we find in the days of which we write no similitude with the
days of the war. A greater curse than had fallen on them when war was
waged on their soil, had fallen on the people of the South; all those
chivalrous ideas which had given to her people a confidence of
superiority over the North had vanished from the minds of those who
had not entered the Army. It was in the "tented field" that could be
found those qualities which make man the true nobility of the world.
It is true that among those who remained aloof from active
participation in the bloody contest were many men whose hearts beat
with as magnanimous a pulsation as could be found in those of the
patriots and braves of the battle-field; but they were only flowers in
a garden of nature, filled with poisonous weeds that had twined
themselves over the land and lifted up their heads above the purer
plants, which, inhaling the tainted odor emitted by them, sickened and
died, or if by chance they remained and bloomed in the midst of
contamination, and eventually rose above until they soared over their
poisonous companions, their members were too few to make an Eden of a
desert, and they were compelled to see the blossoms of humanity perish
before them unrewarded and uncared for, surfeited in the nauseous and
loathsome exhalations of a cold and heartless world, without the hand
of succor being extended or the pitying tear of earth's inhabitants
being shed upon their untimely graves.

While they, the curse of the world, how was it with them? But one
thought, one desire, filled their hearts; one object, one intention,
was their aim. What of the speculator and extortioner of the South,
Christian as well as Jew, Turk as well as Infidel! From the hour that
the spirit of avarice swept through the hearts