urry. He did not vary the tones of his voice. He kept on praying.
Nor was there panic in the congregation, which did not budge.

That was the longest long prayer I ever heard. When it was finally
ended, and still without changing a note the preacher delivered the
benediction, the crowded church in the most orderly manner moved to the
several doorways.

I was quick to go for my girl. By the time we reached the street the
firing had become general. We had to traverse quite half a mile of it
before attaining a place of safety. Two weeks later we were separated
for nearly two years, when, the war over, we found ourselves at home
again.

In the meantime her father had fallen in the fight, and in the far South
I had buried him. He was one of the most eminent and distinguished
and altogether the best beloved of the Tennesseeans of his day, Andrew
Ewing, who, though a Democrat, had in high party times represented the
Whig Nashville district in Congress and in the face of assured election
declined the Democratic nomination for governor of the state. A foremost
Union leader in the antecedent debate, upon the advent of actual war he
had reluctantly but resolutely gone with his state and section.

V

The intractable Abolitionists of the North and the radical Secessionists
of the South have much historically to answer for. The racial warp
and woof in the United States were at the outset of our national
being substantially homogeneous. That the country should have been
geographically divided and sectionally set by the ears over the
institution of African slavery was the work of agitation that might have
attained its ends by less costly agencies.

How often human nature seeking its bent prefers the crooked to the
straight way ahead! The North, having in its ships brought the negroes
from Africa and sold them to the planters of the South, putting the
money it got for them in its pocket, turned philanthropist. The South,
having bought its slaves from the slave traders of the North under the
belief that slave labor was requisite to the profitable production of
sugar, rice and cotton, stood by property-rights lawfully acquired,
recognized and guaranteed by the Constitution. Thence arose an
irrepressible conflict of economic forces and moral ideas whose doubtful
adjustment was scarcely worth what it cost the two sections in treasure
and blood.

On the Northern side the issue was made to read freedom, on the Southern
side, se