form the most inoffensive portion of the population. Although the partisan fights and tumults of the white men often originate about slaves, the latter never interfere in them, just as we see, in the present war, North and South fighting about the negroes, who do not stir hand or foot. Surely these raving Southerners display unexampled boldness: they resemble people throwing fire about on a ground strewn with gunpowder. But that they could venture it, and successfully too, is the most remarkable proof of the durability of the fetters, and the permanency of that system of serfdom in which they have entangled their natural foes, as a spider does the fly whose life-blood it sucks out.

The negroes of Washington are, in ordinary times, a very harmless race. They live in the suburbs, in cottages, many of which are comfortably furnished, round which you may see the black children happily playing. They have their own churches, generally well built, and tidily kept up, and in which Methodist preachers of their own nation and colour perform the service. The female slaves are mostly the washerwomen, milliners, and cooks of the city, and the men principally engage themselves as hackney-coachmen and drivers. Next to the Russian droschki drivers, the negroes are the best-tempered fellows in the world. When not engaged, they may be seen standing in groups, joking and laughing tremendously. On Sunday the city appears almost entirely to belong to the negroes, for on that day they, and specially their wives, or, as they call them, "ladies," parade in the most elegant costumes, the most glaring colours, the broadest crinolines, rustling in silks, and most closely imitating the white ladies and gentlemen. When you look them in the face, you really fancy that you have monkeys before you, for it is impossible that Africa can produce uglier faces than some of those you notice among the long-expatriated, English-speaking and christened negroes of Washington. Where these "oppressed" people obtained their finery was long a mystery to me; but I saw, also, negro funerals, at which long rows of two-horsed carriages formed the cortége. I also noticed at times a hackney-coach full of laughing negro faces, driven by a white coachman, who had hired himself out for the day; but I never noticed that the white mob or the street boys annoyed or insulted the negro women, though they might be most absurdly attired. More than once I witnessed negro boys fighting with white lads, and heartily thrashing them. I mention all these minor facts merely as matters characteristic of the life of the city I am describing, though I cannot here enter into further details or explanations.

Many of the smaller citizens are decided partisans of slavery, and exercise the power and privileges they have acquired over their black fellow men as rigorously and unmercifully as any Louisiana planter. "Why are you so sad?" I once asked Mary, a negro slave, and mother of two children, who waited on us in the house of a small Washington tradesman and letter of lodgings. "Ah! sir," she replied, "I have just heard some terrible news;" and with many tears in her eyes, she told us how, on the previous evening, she had overheard a conversation between her master and his wife, the subject being her little boy Johnny, thirteen years of age. "Johnny," the mistress began, "is nearly thirteen, and fit for work. He is in our way here, we can make no use of him, and he eats more every day. Would it not be as well to think of taking

him to market?" "I thought of that long ago," Mary's master answered. "Johnny is worth his one hundred dollars now, and I had quietly made up my mind to take him to Richmond next week, where we can best dispose of him." "Won't you take his sister, little Evangeline, with you too ?" "We had better keep her a little while longer. She is only ten, costs us but little, and will be worth one hundred dollars more three years hence. She can stay."

eye

Such conversations and consultations the bons petits bourgeois of Washington hold by the cheery light of the lamp, when preparing for bed, and ere they repeat the evening prayer. We Europeans cannot help, on hearing such remarks, thinking of the story of the ogre, who asks the ogress which of Hop-o'-my-Thumb's companions he shall kill first. At the same time, there appears before my mind's the fettered negro, in whose company I entered Washington for the first time. He was a tall, handsome, powerfully-built man, a runaway slave, who had been fetched from the North, and was being conveyed back to the South. His muscular arms had been handcuffed, and his legs laid in shackles, and he was thus placed in an upright position in the last compartment of our railway train, which was filled with freemen of the republic. As we spoke with this poor victim of the harsh laws, and made him a slight present, a pale little tobacco-chewer, a wretched weakling, with common though crafty features, emerged from among the passengers. He was the negro's owner or watcher, who came up and exchanged a few glances with us and his gigantic victim. My travelling companion at the time was a senator, a liberal, nobly-minded man of the North, who shed silent tears of pity and compassion at seeing a foreigner enter the capital of his land under such auspices and impressions. But neither he nor I dared, in the company in which we found ourselves, to make any further display of our feelings and sentiments.

Very pleasant and beneficial to me was the slice of Europe that may be found in the Federal capital, mingled with all the other American, African, and Indian elements. All our great powers are naturally represented here by their ambassadors, and these, with their families, generally present most agreeable society. What is offered you there you accept the more eagerly and gratefully on account of the contrast. And a European, even if he be an Englishman or a German, feels himself here the brother of the Frenchman, Spaniard, or Italian, and is united to them by a bond of sympathy. All strangers make here, to a certain extent, a common front against the Americans, which may serve as a proof how strangely their peculiar colour and physiognomy is opposed to that of old Europe.

Most of the diplomatists reside on the pleasant hills of Georgetown, a sort of suburb of Washington, which in this respect bears a resemblance to the Constantinopolitan Pera, also inhabited by diplomatists. Strictly speaking, this Georgetown, which reminds us of the old English kings, is a town of itself. It is of much older date than Washington, whose existence in this locality, where the navigation of the great Chesapeake Bay terminates, and that on its rivers and canals begins, was attached to very natural conditions. Hence it will in all probability survive Washington, whose life is connected with such changeable political conditions.

The skirts of the wooded range of Georgetown, in the distance enclosing Washington, which lies in the heart of a plain, are adorned by a

number of very pretty country-houses and gardens, in which we spent many a pleasant hour. With most pleasure, however, I visited the Jesuit college enthroned on those heights, the only spot in Washington where you can still find in the foundation library old pig-skin bound books, and honest, solid and heavy folios; where you have, too, opportunity to associate with men of college education, and where we sought shelter with the greatest pleasure on Sundays. For on such a day the liberal Jesuits at any rate, they have kept themselves free from the terroristic, criminal, and hyperpuritanic Sabbath laws-closed their outer gates to keep themselves aloof from the city, which was wearisome and mournful on this day; and within these walls a merry life, pleasing both to Heaven and man, went on. Their young pupils, after the morning service, played at racquet and other games, and the fathers with their guests walked in pleasant converse through the vineyards that cover the slopes of the monastery hill. These vineyards have an historic import for the American vintage, which has made such progress during the last few years, for they are the oldest in the United States. The Jesuits made here the first American wine, and first ennobled here the wild American grape, shoots of which were afterwards sent to the valleys of the Ohio and the Mississippi. I might have mentioned this Jesuit college, by the way, among the secular establishments of Washington, for its astronomer observatory has done no inconsiderable service in American astronomy, and one of the brothers of the order edited for many years an astronomical journal.

The prospect from the towers of the building is as fine as that enjoyed from the terrace of the Capitol. You can overlook thence the city, with its wholly or half-finished palaces and monuments extending at its feet, and in the background the green skirt of the woods forming a semicircle to the north. To the south the eye is lost in the broad expanse of water hurrying to the ocean, while on either side the distant hills of Maryland and Virginia display their bluish hazy outline. The prospect in itself would be attractive enough, and has been brilliantly reproduced by many American artists; but what a shadow seems cast over the smiling landscape when heavy clouds have gathered on the political sky that overarches it.

The Collegiate hill, the silent abode of serious brethren, is four miles from the opposite pole of the city, the hill of the Capitol, the gatheringplace of embittered parties, at the extreme end of the city district. From it you can descend by agreeable footpaths to the Potomac, and walk along its green banks to the pretty cataracts, which are a frequently visited and grateful spot to the few friends of nature that exist in Washington. "Here all is so peaceful and silent," we feel and say with Pliny; "here no toga is required. There is no one at hand to run against you, and in the charming sound of the waters you readily forget the repulsive murmur of the Forum."

VOL. L.

2 D

SUMMER DAYS IN SCOTLAND.

A GREAT charm of the ruined abbey of Melrose (the first place of celebrity I visited on my way to Argyllshire in the sunniest days of the now bygone summer) is the character of the scenery by which it is surrounded. Wooded acclivities adorn the landscape, and the silvery Tweed flows by green haughs bright with the golden flowers of "the bonny broom," by

-waving fields and pastures green,

With gentle slopes and groves between,

in a region "where every field has its story and every rivulet its song," and where the natural features of the country derive a heightened charm from their historic memories. But the interest of association seems to culminate in "the ruined pride" of Melrose, which, with the Eildons' purple peaks on the one side, and the bright river on the other, is set in a thoroughly Cistercian valley of wood and water.

That was a great day for Melrose and for Scotland which beheld a little colony of monks from Rievaux arrive, at the bidding of St. David, in this fair valley of the Tweed to found a new abbey under those weird hills, and in the shadow of the great name of that older Melrose, which (originally deriving its faith from Iona) had been founded here in the seventh century by St. Aidan, the Celtic apostle of Northumberland, and was long a lamp of Christianity to the northern province. But the Cistercians, who now came to plant the light of the Gospel among the rude and turbulent natives of this part of the old Saxon kingdom of Northumbria, chose for their abbey a different site to that of old Melrose, and reared its Norman walls upon a meadow sloping to the Tweed, where the triple peaks of Eildon rose above the adjacent hills of the royal forest in which the jolly abbots afterwards loved to chase their deer. But of this early fabric no portion remains. During the Wars of the Succession in Scotland, Melrose suffered in common with the other Border abbeys, and in 1326 the present edifice rose, under the care of King Robert Bruce, who marked his pious affection for the place by appointing his heart to be deposited within its walls. The architecture of the chief part of it shows that it was built before the close of the fourteenth century, but the graceful symmetry of its structure, and the delicacy as well as profusion of its sculptured ornaments, render it the glory of Scottish ecclesiastical art.

It must be confessed that the reality falls short of the poetic ideal of Melrose; and certainly, on a first view, to see the grey and shattered ruins standing hardly apart from the little town, is to be disenchanted, for mean and unsightly dwellings have crept up to the walls of the church and deprived it of the romantic seclusion which generally characterises a Cistercian abbey, and always renders more impressive its "calm decay." But I forgot these incongruous surroundings when I stood-not, indeed, by moonlight, but in "the gay beams of lightsome day"—in the interior of the deserted pile. The nave is ruined and roofless, but the choir and transepts are in better preservation, and remarkable for their dignified beauty, and over the east end the fretted and sculptured stone roof remains. The

-slender shafts of shapely stone By foliaged tracery combined;

the capitals, the mouldings, the architectural enrichments and sculptured figures, are as sharp and perfect as when they were cut; and the east window and the south transept window retain their elegant tracery. The ruined central tower, with its curious parapet of quatrefoils, rises on lofty and massive pointed arches; the chancel roof remains, and the vaulting and quaint sculptured adornments of the range of chapels in the south aisle are almost entire. On the outside, most of the pinnacles, canopies, niches, statues, and strange goblin-looking heads that so profusely cover the building, remain. But in every part of the abbey church that sacrilegious hands could reach, and in the total destruction of the monastic buildings, we see the barbarous ravages committed, first by the Earl of Hertford's army, in 1545, and afterwards by the fanatical rage of the reforming mobs roused by the hateful Knox, and of the Covenanters, in whose sight all architectural beauty was abomination. When more peaceful times arrived, the abbey became a convenient stone quarry for the buildings of the town.

I did not visit any other abbey of the Tweed or the Teviot, but, after seeing Melrose, climbed "the steep where" Roslin's chapel "shines afar," and felt the striking contrast presented between the Renaissance decorations of that unique and celebrated building and the Gothic graces of Melrose. Roslin chapel was built not long after the completion of the latest portions of that abbey church, for it was founded in 1446, but so exotic is its style, and so elaborately is it encrusted with decorations, that it seems a kind of architectural dream perpetuated in sculptured stone. The chapel is being prepared for Anglican worship, but the attempt at fac-simile restoration of decayed parts destroys all historical validity in the building indeed, what is done is not restoration but substitution. It is exalted on a lofty ridge, from which there is a fine view of the picturesque Pentland hills and the distant range of the Lammermoors. The adjacent massive archway and tiers of strong vaults are the remains of the castle of its ancient lords-the stronghold "where erst St. Clairs held princely sway," and it is a fit scene for the most romantic legends. By supernatural aid the first Baron of Roslin is recorded to have won this lordship from Robert Bruce, and on the death of the lords of Roslin a supernatural illumination in the chapel is said to have been always witnessed.

It is pleasant to pass from the vaults of Roslin to the sunshine and exhilarating air-from the decaying monuments of human splendour to the ever-renewing beauties of nature in the adjacent scenery; and I do not know a river glen where wood and rock and water are seen in more enchanting combination than in the deep dell which winds between Roslin and "the classic Hawthornden." The mansion is built above caverned precipices, on a lofty cliff, round the base of which the North Esk river flows through a deep, luxuriantly wooded winding dell; and the house seems externally in much the same state as it was when repaired, in 1638, by the poet and historian William Drummond, and when Ben Jonson made his pedestrian journey from London to visit him.

In those pre-locomotive days people were not so constantly admonished to "move on"-they enjoyed leisure to linger amidst caves and wooded rivers, and to turn aside from the crowded highways to visit monuments