is a touch of panic in the despatch which he sent to Mr. Seward at a
time when both secretary and public were held too closely in the throes
of reconstruction to take alarm at so distant a chimera. Agents of the
Southern States, wrote the minister, claimed that not thousands of
families, but a hundred thousand families, would come to Brazil.

As a matter of fact, this exodus, when it took place, was so small that
it failed to raise a ripple on the social pool of the Western
Hemisphere. But to the self-chosen few who suffered shipwreck and
privation, financial loss from their already depleted store, disaster to
their Utopian dreams, and a great void in their hearts where once had
been love of country, it became a tragedy--the tragedy of existence.

The ardor that led a small band of irreconcilables to gather their
households and their household goods about them and flee from a personal
oppression, as had their ancestors before them, was destined to be short
lived. From the first, fate frowned upon their enterprise. They looked
for calm seas and favorable winds, but they found storms and shipwreck.
Their scanty resources were calculated to meet the needs of only the
crudest life, but upon the threshold of their goal they fell into the
red-tape trammels of a civilization older than their own. Where they
looked for a free country, a wilderness flowing with milk and honey,
which in their ignorance they imagined unpeopled, they found the
squatter had been intrenched since the Jesuit fathers and their
following explored the continent four centuries before. Finally, they
believed themselves to be the vanguard of a horde, but, once in the
breach, they found there was no following host.

Most of those who had the means reversed their flight. Others, with
nothing left but their broken pride, sought aid from the government they