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148 posal as this, the President's notion of carrying off four millions of people who do not want to go, from half a million of gentry who do not want to part with them, and from land which their departure will turn into a wilderness, to starve in a present wilderness, looks like insanity. It is all meditated, however. The apparent leap in the dark is, in fact, crossing a bridge; and the President and all his train are coming over to the Abolitionists.

There is nothing visionary, or even new, in such a scheme as is proposed. There is always some plantation, here or there, where the negroes are, by some accident, living like free labourers. This reminds me of what happened in North Carolina, when I was over there. A widow lady was called away from her estate for a permanence, by some obligation or other; and it became a question what to do about the negroes. They were sorely afraid of being "sold South;" and they were delighted at the proposal that they should choose an overseer out of their own number, and manage for themselves. They were to make themselves comfortable, and earn what they could for their mistress. They chose the ablest negro on the plantation to superintend, and went to work.

Some months later, a great noise and shouting was heard on the estate, and the neighbours said, when the report of insurrection was spread, that they always knew what would become of such a venture. It was only holiday mirth, however, The negroes had gone to work on a general holiday, some time before, because the crop was in a critical state, and would not bear delay and they were taking their holiday now;—that was all. The crop was a good one, and their mistress had a larger income than usual from her estate. It would be a pity to send four millions of these people into the wilderness, if it were ever so practicable. But such is not to be their fate.

Already, the destiny of "the miserable, degraded, insulted" class may be heard told in that voice of supplication in the Capitol, "We pray for the slave."

THE TEN YARD SEAM.

picturesqueness, has been so pierced with shafts and covered with pit-rubbish, so befouled with the vapours of countless fires, and so thickly stud- ded over with pit-frames and furnaces, dreary iron- works and drearier dwellings, that the eye, accus- tomed to brighter scenes and pleasanter surround- ings, turus at first with a sense of hopeless weari. ness from contemplating a picture of such appa. rently unmitigated wretchedness. Seen under its worst aspect, with a low sky and driving rain, the black country is almost Dantean in its horrible- ness, and seems fitted, like the circles of the Inferno, for the abode of lost spirits, rather than human beings. There is one condition, however, under which even this grim district puts on a little of the picturesque and becomes almost beautiful by comparison with its every-day appearanco. When night has fallen, and the ugliness of the landscape is lost in its shadows, the numberless fires from coke-hearths, and the leaping flames which issue from the open months of roaring blast- furnaces, lend a peculiar though still hardly an agreeable interest to the scene. The landscape of South Staffordshire furnishes an admirable example of the changes man can effect by means of persevering, if profitable, deface- ment. Originally a region of peculiar beauty, and deriving from its geological formation all those aids to local loveliness which the Silurian rocks afford, the neighbourhood of Dudley, once rivalled classic Hagley in attractiveness, but the only traces now remaining of its former glories must be sought in the names of places from which the miners' pick and the coal-masters' machinery have long ago driven the last vestige of comeliness. Harts Hill, Brierley Hill, Rocks Hill and Peusnett Chace, tell by their etymology how changed are all things since these now black and suoty localities first received their old and suggestive nomenclature.

But if nature be no longer lovely to the eye throughout this dreary district, she certainly com. pensates for her ugliness by a singular liberality. if handsome is that handsome does " be a rule applicable alike to men and minerals, then ought we to count the patch of country, bounded by our imaginary circle, the true garden of England-nay, a very Eden for beauty. Within its limited area lies the richest and most valuable coal-field yet Ir the reader will take a geologically coloured discovered, not only in the British islands, but map of England, aud placing one leg of a pair of throughout the world, and from this black centre compasses upon the town of Dudley, describe has radiated, one might safely say, almost all the a circle having a radius of about three miles, its lines of industrial activity which now spread circumference will be found to include the darkest throughout the length and breadth of the land. It tinted patch throughout the whole country,--a was here that the discoveries of Dud Dudley, sup- distriet not dark upon the map alone, but deusely plemented by those of Watt, gave the first great and detestably black in actual dirty reality. This lift to our manufacturing system. It was in the is the South Staffordshire coal field, commonly "black country" (then by no means black) that known as the "black country," and certainly no the former of these pioneers of mechanical science region could better deserve the characteristie so- proved the feasibility of making iron from the ore briquet it bears, for, compared with its foulness, by means of pit coal, and in proving this laid the even Sheffield is pure, and Leeds embodied cleanli foundation upon which the great iron trade of our ness. The whole area of this the finest and own day rests. Before his time the coal of South most valuable of the British coal-fields lies under Staffordshire was valuable only for such compara- a perpetual cloud of smoke; the landscape is tively unimportant purposes as household and barren, treeless, and wretched beyond all deserip- smithy use; a limited production of iron was with tion, the ground that once-before the value of the difficulty kept up by the fast-failing supplies of mineral which underlies it was recognised-swelled wood and the rapid expansion of this manufacture into bills and dipped into valleys of the utmost, which followed on Dudley's successful experiments.