We will not stop to describe his old weatherboarded, often wainscotted, house, with its queer old furniture and its old family portraits, which indicate for Jeems Jimmison or his wife a better origin than.

his name would lead you to expect. One peculiarity, though, must not go unmentioned. No matter how small this house is, it is never full. There is always room for one more in it; and, on special occasions, such as a wedding or a Christmas frolic, the number of feather beds, straw beds, shuck beds, pallets and shakedowns which this old house produces is literally incredible. To feed and lodge, if need be, the entire State is not a point of honor with Coonrod, but a matter of course — no other idea ever entered his head. What is called "hospitality'' by other folks is with him so much a part of his nature that lie has no name for it (unless he keeps an " Entertainment,") and he never uses the word. How he managed, on a worn-out estate, to repeat, as it were, the miracle of the loaves and fishes, is a mystery which must be charged, I fear, to the " barbarism of slavery," for the art of feeding and lodging everybody seems already to be passing away.

Nor can we stop to describe the good wife of the native Virginian, with her check apron, key-basket, and knitting sheath, — the pattern of domestic virtue ; a matron, compared with whom the Roman matron, so famed, is as inferior as paganism is to the religion of our Saviour; the hardest-worked slave on the estate, — toiling, as she does, from year to year and year after year, for every human being, black and white, male and female, young and old, on the plantation, and yet a Christian gentlewoman, refined, tender, pure, — almost too good and pure for earth. Think what she has done for Virginia! Think, too,

that, under the new order of things, she also may be passing away. Of all the sad things which press upon us in these troubled days, there is none so sad as this; no, not one. For without the Virginia matron there is no longer any Virginia; and without Virginia, what, to Virginians, is this world ? Let us hasten away from the thought.

In like manner, we must hasten away from Larkin's sons and daughters: the former brave and wild, — destined to run much their father's course ; the latter unaccountably pretty, spirited and cultivated. If- it be a matter of wonder how Mrs. Coonrod manages to get up such marvellous breakfasts and dinners out of her dingy, dirt-floored kitchen, still more wonderful are the girls whom she raises in her "shakledy" old house, ten miles from anywhere, and entirely out of the world. We cannot spare the time to praise the boys and girls, — the noble products of a social system which mankind has united to put down, — for the native Virginian, as we now find him, is almost entirely alone, his family being scattered far and wide — all married and thriving, except one "black sheep," who has taken to drink, to fiddling and to shrouding everybody in the neighborhood who dies.

In person, the old man is above the medium height, "dark-complected," spare built, and generally long and lean in the lower limbs, — and that's the reason he rides a horse so well. His voice is loud, owing to a habit he has of conversing familiarly with the hands in the field about a mile and a half off. His vision is wonderfully acute, — partly from long prac-

His individuality, his independence and indifference to matters on which other people set great store,.

is shown, not only in his pronunciation, but in his dress — you see it in the tie of his cravat, the cut of his coat, the fit of his waistcoat, the set of his pantaloons, the reaching of his hair, and the color of his pocket-handkerchief — a red bandanna with yellow spots. But the whole character of the man is fully told only when you come to open his " secretary." There you will find his bonds, accounts, receipts, and even his will, jobbed into pigeon holes or lying about loose in the midst of a museum of powder-horns,, shot-gourds, turkey-yelpers, flints, screws, pop-corn, old horse-shoes and watermelon seed.

(It is strange how this pop-corn and watermelonseed carelessness crops out in the people at large. I could give a hundred examples, but will content myself with only one. Will it be believed that the library and the collections of the Historical Society of the great State of Virginia, — a State transcendently rich in storied fame — will it be believed that this library and collection are so meagre that they are contained in a few wooden boxes, and that those boxes are or were lying, for want of a better placer in the basement of a private gentleman's residence ? Such, nevertheless, is the fact. I have an object in making this statement. I am sanguine enough to hope that, somewhere out of the limits of our impoverished State, I will find another Peabody, a Virginian by birth, affiliation or sympathy, who will

This Society is at present comfortably domiciled in roomsprovided by the Westmoreland Club, Richmond, Va. ; but it remains yet to be permanently and properly provided for.

place the Historical Society of the Old Commonwealth on a firm and enduring basis, and, by this single act, make his name as lasting as the glory of the State itself. This hope may be vain, but I shall cherish it until it is dispelled.)

How such a man, with such a "secretary," can succeed in life, and how, above all, he and the like of him contrived to play the part which they have played in the history of this country, is something to be accounted for only on the bacon and greens principle.

Since the first settlement at Jamestown, when the hogs increased so fast that the town had to be palisaded in order to keep them out, Virginians have been well spoken of ; but of late, and since the downfall of the old Commonwealth, praise, in some quarters, has been lavish. Is it on the principle, De mortuis nil nisi bonum, and because it is thought that Virginians are soon to be numbered among the races which have perished? I trust not. But hear what has been said of them by a Northern orator — the Hon. Henry Clay Dean, of Iowa:

"I dare speak one kind word for the oppressed in the very teeth of the oppressor. Since Adam took possession of Eden, no part of his heritage has given to man such an hundred years of history as that of Virginia, beginning with the public life of George Washington, and ending with the surrender of the .armies of Gen. Kobert E. Lee. The great orator, Patrick Henry, whose spirit lighted up the first revolution, and whose persuasive voice called armies up

the valleys and down from the mountains to defend New York, New Jersey and Massachusetts from the invader's hoof, was a Virginian. George Washington, who led those armies, was a Virginian. Thomas Jefferson, whose great soul encompassed the world and lifted its light upon a benighted age to teach it liberty, was a Virginian. James Madison, who environed our rights by a flame of living fire, which,, in the most illustrious periods of the past and present century, preserved unharmed all that was sacred in life and precious in hope — the Constitution of the United States, — was a Virginian. John Marshall, whose luminous rnind, guided by immutable justice, gave being to a most profound and comprehensive judiciary, the bulwark of American institutions, was a Virginian. Henry Clay, whose commanding soul drew after him one full half of the whole moral and intellectual power of America, was a Virginian. The Lees — Richard Henry, Arthur Francis Lightfoot, Light-Horse Harry, and his illustrious son, Robert Edmund Lee, were Virginians. Thomas J. Jackson, the great military genius of the western hemisphere, was a Virginian. The courts and the legislatures, the forums and the pulpits of every State in the Union, and of every government on the continent, have been adorned by Virginians. Their blood, shed in noble defence of liberty, has fattened every valley, and their bones have bleached on every mountain, from Bunker Hill to the city of Mexico." I can imagine Larkin's smile as he reads, or hears read, these compliments. He is simple-minded and

easily flattered ; but — the sop comes a little too late. We, who know him better, have no flattery to bestow on him ; on the contrary, if the truth must be told, we can but pronounce him as great a bundle of infirmities, crotchets and vices as was ever put together. I say " vices." Does he not chew homespun tobacco inordinately and spit promiscuously ? Does he not neglect to keep a set of books, and care more about giving good dinners than saving money? Was he not, in former times, in the habit of whipping his negroes as often, almost, as his own children ? Did he not cherish the vile political heresy of Staterights, and, in his childish ignorance, proclaim the absurd proposition that Virginia, free and sovereign, antedated the Constitution, and, with her sister sovereigns, gave that Constitution all the power it possessed ? Was he not a heretic in religion as well as in politics, and ever ready to maintain that the pulpit is no place for "Lessons of the Hour," and for the worship of national ensigns? Finally, instead of preaching, did he not practise the doctrine,, "Do unto others as you would be done by," and hold that it was ungentlemanly to cheat, and wrong even to tell lies and to steal? For the life of me, I do not see how you are to natter such a man.

As for the crotchets of the native Virginian, they are no great matter. He will have his pets — his blooded mare, his favorite pointer, his pack of hounds, his game rooster, "Dominicker" hen, "cropper-crown" pullet, muscovy drake, and a little lame negro, who lights his pipe with a coal of fire from

the kitchen and pats " Juba" for him. But the most -curious of his whims (and one which is somewhat rare among native Virginians) is a deadly hatred of liquor in all of its forms; an exceedingly strange whim indeed, you will admit, and one which, as I have observed, is generally accompanied by preposterous vagaries about the virtues of blood-root, puccoon-root, "jimson" weed, white-oak bark, dog-wood, wild-cherry, Indian-turnip and wake-robin.

Notions like these may be tolerated, but who can bear the cabbage-head weakness of a man who will not consult his own interests before all other interests ; will concern himself about politics when he ought to be inventing a new method of making doughnuts out -of free-love, and looking, philanthropically, after the moral and intellectual welfare of the man in the moon; and who is so incurably conservative that he won't fill up the mud-puddle in front of his gate, -won't mend the lock on his back door, or whitewash his worm-fences, or paint his crank-sided carriagehouse, or clean the teeth of his cattle with Sozodont, or dress his field-hands in duplex-elliptic hoop-skirts ? What are we to think of such a man ?

" A blunder," says Fouchet, " is worse than a 'Crime;" and, in a worldly point of view, the native Virginian is a mass of blunders. "A persistent course of murder," according to De Quincey, " will inevitably end in procrastination," — the worst of crimes ; and procrastination is the grand characteristic of the native Virginian. He will not do to-day what can be done to-morrow, or do to-morrow what