There are persons with nervous organisms so abused that a sudden cry,
whether it be of boisterousness or despair, will cause them great
agony: so there are others with moral susceptibilities so overstrained
that the story of a nation's misery and crime, such as I have
endeavored to sketch, will evoke within them more pain than interest.
Regard for such exceptional persons has created a namby-pambyism in
literature which would banish these topics--the greatest and holiest
in which human sympathy can be enlisted--to the domains of science.
But science cannot aid unhappy Portugal. Sympathy and prayer alone can
mitigate our sufferings. Therefore sympathize with and pray for us,
you who stand in the broad glare of freedom, filled with plenty and
surrounded by promise, Pray for unhappy Portugal!




AT THE OLD PLANTATION.

TWO PAPERS.--I.


The life of the low-country South Carolina planter, until broken up by
the war, had changed but little since colonial times. It was the life
which Washington lived at Mount Vernon, with some slight differences
of local custom. The two-storied house, with its ten or twenty rooms
and broad piazza, had probably been built in ante-Revolutionary days
by the British country gentleman or Huguenot exile from whom the
present owner drew his descent. I well remember how the old house
at Hanover bore near the top of the chimney stack the legend "_Peu à
peu_" written with a stick in the soft mortar with which the bricks