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bogy of "Rain to-morrow. It always comes, and keeps on for a month when it starts in." Blessed be the weather clerk! It never started in-not until I reached Brindisi on my way back to Paris; then, if I remember, there was some falling weather -at the rate of two inches an hour.

I might as well confess that my two weeks' study of the Acropolis, beginning at the recently uncovered entrance gate and ending in the Museum behind the Parthenon, added nothing to my previous knowledge—meagre as it had been. Where the Venetians wrought the greatest havoc, many and what columns were thrown down; how high and thick and massive they were; what parts of the marvellous ruin that High Robber Chief Lord Elgin stole and carted off to London, and still keeps the British Museum acting as "fence"; how wide and long and spacious was the

how

superb chamber that held the statue the gods loved-none of these things interested me-do not now. What I saw was an epoch in stone; a chronicle telling the story of a civilization; a glove thrown down to posterity, challenging the competition of the world.

And with this came a feeling of reverence so profound, so awe-inspiring, so humbling, that I caught myself speaking to Panis in whispers as one does in a temple when the service is in progress. This, as the sun sped its course and the purple shadows of the coming night began to creep up the steps and columns of the marvellous pile, its pediment bathed in the rose-glow of the fading day, was followed by a silence that neither of us cared to break. For then the wondrous temple took on the semblance of some old sage, the sunlight on his forehead the shadow of the future about his knees.

THE STRANGER

By Grace Fallow Norton

ALL through the village we are still;
We wait for him to pass.

In the white villa on the hill

They turn and turn the glass.

He is a stranger-fair, they say,
And young. The young should live!
The beautiful, the strong, the gay,
Deep into life should dive

And breast its waves and buoyant swim—

Alas-he drifts to port.

Another current carries him

Beyond the billow-sport,

Beyond the harbor, past the hill,
Beneath the churchyard grass.

All through the village we are still.
We wait for him to pass.

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Now the Civil War is in its fifth decade behind us, and the time has come for drawing upon the last considerable collection of General Sherman's writing to which the public may expect even a limited admission. These are the letters which he wrote to Ellen Boyle Ewing, who, in 1850, became his wife. To the house of her father, the Hon. Thomas Ewing, of Ohio, he went to live as a son upon the death of his own father in 1829. The first of the letters bears the date of 1837, the year in which the boy of seventeen left his adopted, and adopting, home to become a cadet at West Point. Mr. Ewing was then Secretary of War, and to him young Sherman owed his appointment to the military school. This debt, he would have been the first to say, was quite secondary to that of the whole-souled boyand-girl relationship which grew into the vital devotion and confidence of man and wife. In and out of the army Sherman was of necessity long and often separated from the domestic centre in which his strong affections were deeply rooted. His letters home, therefore, were always the frank and authentic records of the events which most nearly concerned him. The historic importance of these events would of itself justify the publication of the letters. But to this must be added their biographical significance. Through their fresh illumination of the Civil War period, with which the present series will particularly deal, and through their spontaneous revealing of the more intimate human qualities of Sherman himself, they belong to the annals both of American history and of American biography.

Sherman was no exception to the rule that the men whose names were most closely linked with glory when the Civil War was done were at its beginning virtually unknown to fame. His military opportunities had been few and unimportant. The Southern posts, to which he was ordered after graduating at West Point, were cramped arenas for distinction. The Mexican War brought him nothing better than quiet service in California. In his "Memoirs" he wrote: "I felt deeply the fact that our country had passed through a foreign war, that my comrades had fought great battles, and yet I had not heard a hostile shot. Of course, I thought it the last and only chance in my day, and that my

career as a soldier was at an end." In 1853 he resigned from the army, with encouraging prospects of success in banking. Instead, the ill-starred time brought him disappointments and losses in California, New York and St. Louis. Yet everywhere came occasions for playing the part of a man, and everywhere he played it manfully. Everywhere, too, the unpublished letters, like the "Memoirs," reveal him making the most of all opportunities for self-improvement. As early as 1842, when he was only twentytwo, we see him, for example, cultivating at Fort Moultrie, S. C., his gift for painting. In 1844 he utilizes the leisure of the same Southern post by reading law. This activity of mind and spirit shows itself again and again. One is not surprised at finding him receiving a lawyer's license in Kansas, in 1858, without examination, "on the ground of general intelligence."* The entire autobiographic record speaks, always indirectly, for the rare accumulations not only of intelligence, but of the fruits of character which Sherman brought to the last employment he undertook before the outbreak of the Civil War.

This was the superintendency of the Louisiana State Seminary of Learning and Military Academy, which opened its doors to pupils on January 1, 1860. It must have been partly "on the ground of general intelligence" again that Sherman was selected for this work. Certainly he had had no special training for the conduct of an institution of learning. But the school was more than that. Its founders had before their eyes the model of such an academy as the Virginia Military Institute, which in turn looked to West Point for many of its ideals; and Sherman's military education and experience were, of course, an important element in his equipment for the new task. Had either he or the Louisiana authorities known that secession and war were impending it is obvious that a soldier so devoted to the Union would never have gone into the South with the mission which took him there. What he experienced in handling a difficult administrative problem, what he gained in the clarifying of his own outlook upon national issues, in a word, what he learned in his brief period of teaching-all this is set forth in the letters about and from the Seminary of Learning and

"Memoirs" (1885), I, 168.

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Sherman, who remained with their children decent independence. I don't much apprein Lancaster, Ohio:

STEAMER L. M. Kennett,

Saturday, October 29, 1859.

I find Southern men, even men as well informed as Turner,* are as big fools as the abolitionists. Though Brown's whole expedition proves clearly that the Northern people oppose Slavery in the abstract, and yet very few will go so far as to act, yet the extreme Southrons pretend to think that the northern people have nothing to do but steal niggers and preach sedition.

* Major Turner, of St. Louis, Sherman's former partner in the banking business.

hend such a state of case, still feeling runs so high when a nigger is concerned that like religious questions, common sense is disregarded, and a knowledge of the character of mankind in such cases induces me to point out a combination that may yet operate on our fate.

I have heard men of good sense say that the union of States any longer was impossible, and that the South was preparing for a change. If such a change be contemplated and overt acts be attempted, of course, I will not go with the South because with

*The Hon. John Sherman was especially conspicuous at this time as the Republican candidate for Speaker of the House of Representatives.

† Mrs. Sherman's brother, afterwards Gen. Thomas Ewing, then a lawyer in Leavenworth, Kansas.

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Home of Hon. Thomas Ewing, Lancaster, Ohio, where General Sherman spent his youth.

slavery, and the whole civilized world opposed to it, they in case of leaving the Union will have worse wars and tumults than now distinguish Mexico.

If I have to fight hereafter I would prefer an open country and white enemies.

I merely allude to these things now because I have heard a good deal lately about such things, and generally that the southern states, by military colleges and organizations, were looking to a dissolution of the Union. If they design to protect themselves against negroes, or abolitionists, I will help; if they propose to leave the Union on account of a supposed fact that the northern people are all abolitionists like Giddings and Brown, then I will stand by Ohio and the North West.

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The preparations for opening the school, in "a gorgeous palace altogether too good for its purpose," the discipline of refractory pupils, the delicacy of Sherman's own position as the brother of so notable a Republican as John Sherman-these and many other passing matters filled the letters of the first months in Louisiana. A letter of the summer when all men were beginning to wonder what the next administration at Washington would bring forth shows Sher

man still a Northerner who could hold office in the South as honorably and consistently as any of his kind:

ALEXANDRIA, July 10, 1860. I feel little interest in politics and certainly am glad to see it realized that politicians can't govern the country. They may agitate, but cannot control. Let who may be elected, the same old game will be played, and he will go out of office like Pierce and Buchanan with their former honors all sunk and lost. I only wonder that honorable men should seek the office.

I do not conceive that any of the parties would materially interfere with the slavery in the states, and in the territories it is a mere abstraction. There is plenty of room in the present Slave States for all the negroes, but the time has come when the Free States may annoy the Slave States by laws of a general declaration, but that they will change the relation of master and slave I don't believe. All the Congresses on earth can't make the negro anything else than what he is; he must be subject to the white man, or he must amalgamate or be destroyed. Two such races cannot live in harmony save as master and slave. Mexico shows the result of general equality and

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