it but the Slitting of a Schoolboy's thumb-nail with Horse-cake cutting Dog-knife,) may indeed unite again, but never as before, and neither the fractured limb nor incised skin regains in all time its primordial strength.

What think you, then, of the comminuted bone of Union knitting together again by dint of bayonet ! Rough needles these, but strong! Will they hold? Methinks so. How long? No answer.

Consider, above all, the nature of Hate-rankest weed that grows in this our human Adam-earth,— sending its damned tap-roots far down into the abysses of the Soul, and interlocking them there, so that Divine Power itself can scarce undo them; Death's Scythe, perchance, failing to do the work, and the baneful Upas-plant flourishing, we know not how, beyond the grave! Love, too oft, is but a shallowrooted thing, shooting its tender fibrils along the surface-soil, and easily uptorn by man's hand, or rude winds even. Not so with Hate. Once implanted in Man's nature and moistened with tears and blood, (the fructifying showers of War Civil, War Sectional, or War International,) it becomes part of Man's being, and re-appears, lush and green and strong, generation after generation. Not for nothing is this Devilsown, Hades-nurtured plant permitted by the AllPowerful to grow in Man's heart. For it comes there not by Accident, and it remains by Design. Union has its uses-Disunion its. The mystical, uncomprehended force of Electricity attracts, but it also Repels. Repulsion is part of its nature, to divorce

which were to destroy the Attraction likewise, and thus end its very existence. Life—all physical life— is electrical, and has its pole of Love and its pole of Hate. It was made so by its Maker.

Reunions there have been-as the Scot and Sassenach, Red Rose and White Rose, Guelph and Ghibelline exceptions truly the one against the many, and in Lands too narrow to be well or easily divided. But the French and English, English and Irish, Russ and Pole, Austrian and Italian, Spaniard and French-when we recall these century-lasting Hatreds, causeless often (save that silly Kings chose to originate them), causeless, yet hopelessly immedicable; and when we bethink us how the very Babes of our day are lapping Hate with their mother's milk, the prospect of any true Reunion of icy Yank and fiery Reb is, I trow, most feeble-shadowy, slimy, and phantasmal.

In verity, the issue of such non-desirable, and indeed impossible Reunion can be but scalding steam— many-volumed, centrifugal, tending outward, quick combustion, at length inevitable explosion and hideous ruin.

No, my friends, the War was a Hell-birth, and its termination can be but death-death to all hope of Union. Empire there may be, Kingdoms possibly, Presidential Centralisms, Temporary Congressional Despotisms, Bondholders' Oligarchies, and in the end. Fragmentary Confederacies, Associations, Pacts, Vereins, What-nots-but no "Union."

Much water will run by, many Radicals will go to

their place, the hapless Nigger and his Coon-dog will vanish into utmost Space, and peradventure a maiden School-ma'am be found in Massachusetts; but the Union we shall see, with fleshly eye-never again;. never, never, never!

WHAT I DID WITH MY FIFTY

MILLIONS.

BY MOZIS ADDUMS.

Edited from the Posthumous MS. by CESAR MAURICE, ESQ., of the Richmond (Va.) Whig.

FOR VIRGINIANS ONLY.

[This peculiar production of Dr. Bagby made its first appearance in the columns of the Richmond Whig in 1872. In 1874 it was published in book form by Messrs. J. B. Lippincott & Co., Philadelphia, and had an extensive sale. The names so freely introduced were of real and living persons, the friends and associates of the author, none of whom, so far as is known, took offence at the liberty, but instead united in the general merriment at the comical situations in which they found themselves placed. The dimensions of the present volume do not admit of the full reproduction of the story, if story it may be called, and the compilers, reluctantly yielding to necessity, have stricken out more than half of it, covering the period when Mr. Addums was most busily engaged in the work of disposing of his vast fortune. The chapters here given constitute the opening and closing ones of the remarkable narrative.]

PREFACE BY THE EDITOR.

It seems that the old man ("Mozis")* did really believe that he possessed an enormous sum of money-the internal evidence

* "Mozis Addums," whose "Letters to Billy Ivvins," published in the Southern Literary Messenger many years ago, produced such an excitement in Virginia and throughout the South. Late in life, when Fifty Millions was written, he had learned to spell his name correctly and to write not very bad English.

leaves no doubt whatever on this point-and he must have passed many sleepless nights in imagining what he did with it. He seems, too, to have labored under the additional delusion that he had been for a very long time " cooped up," as he expresses it, in editorial sanctums and libraries, whereas it is well-known that his actual business was that of a hoop-pole splitter in the barrel factory of the Columbian Mills. But this confinement appears to have disagreed with him, and may have led to the mental torsion that gave birth to the strange production now published. Hence the passionate outburst of affection for his foster-mother, Nature, which would be almost ludicrous did we not remember how the simple old soul must have pined for the free life in the woods, to which, as a mauler of rails for Col. Hubard, of Buckingham, he had been accustomed from his very boyhood.

The date "1890" in the first foot-note indicates that the article, written at some uncertain period, was afterwards revised and annotated at intervals, as the old man's strength enabled him to indulge in literary occupations-probably after nightfall, his only leisure time. His precise age has always been a matter of conjecture, but had he lived till 1890 he would have been not less than one hundred and eleven years old. The records of the old Masonic Lodge at Curdsville prove this.

Due allowance must be made for the discrepancies in the annotated dates, for the interpolations of various kinds, and for the garrulity incident to age. These and the doting fondness of the old man for the Virginia customs, which he fancied he had placed upon everlasting foundations, with the further fact that after much reflection he could not prevail upon himself to spend any of his money outside of his native State, may well excuse his wild fancies and incoherences. And our readers no doubt will the more readily condone his faults in view of the fact that, in his prime, the well-meaning creature gave them many a hearty laugh which they have not yet forgotten. C. M.