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About The Rockdale banner. (Conyers, Ga.) 1888-1900 | View Entire Issue (Feb. 17, 1898)
ww* \) t. IN THE VALLEY. To-dav, when the sun wns lighting house on the pineclad hill. The breast of a bird wns ruffled' as it perched window y sill; on my And a leaf was chased by the kitten on the breeze-swept garden walk, And the dainty head Of a dahlia red Was stirred on its slender stalk. Oh, happy the bird at the rose tree, un¬ heeding the tbrent’ning storm! And happy the blithe loaf chaser, rejoicing in sunshine warm! They take no thought for the morrow— they know no cares to-day, And the thousand things That the future brings Are a blank to such as they. But I, by the household ingle, can inter¬ pret the looming clouds, For the wind “soo-hoos” through the key¬ hole. and a shadow the roof en¬ shrouds, And I know I must quit my mountain and go down to the vale below, For my house is chill On the windy hill When the autumn tempests blow. My mind is ever drawing an instructive parallel ’Twixt temporal things that perish and eternal things that dwell; When billows and waves surround me, and waters my soul o’erflow, I descend in hope From the mountain slope To the sheltering vale below. I go down the Valley of Silence, where the worldly are never met, Where I know there is “balm and heal¬ ing” for eyes that with tears are wet; And I find, in its sweet seclusion, gentle solace for all my care, For that valley pure, With its shelter sure, Is the beautiful Vale of Prayer. —Nannie Power O’Donoghue. A STRANGE MARRIAGE. t TIT HARRY WICKHAM. h iii PEAKING of short v courtships, did you til ever hear of the 1 way that old Mr. j, Stebbins came to jjB get married?” 1 The speaker was a solemn looking young man with a V contradictory twinkle fi in his eye. !] He had been in¬ i troduced to the company a minute before by old Mr. Stebbins himself. I didn’t catch his name at the time, and I don’t believe _ any one else did. We leaved it after¬ ward, though in a way not to he for¬ gotten. At first I thought it was Mileson or Miteson, and though it wasn’t I will call him Miteson for the present. “Youwouldn’tthiuk,” hecontinued, “that a sedate gentleman like Mr. Stebbins would have been guilty of a hasty marriage in his youth.” “1 don’t know what you call hasty,” responded you Hyson, jfho had been looking furtively at a large photograph of Miss Stebbins which graced the mantel. “Mr. aud Mrs. Stebbins corresponded for three years. He told me so himself. I wonder what young people did before the camera was invented. The means of travel were so slow and mails so uncertain that, with no telegraph or telephone, I should think that lovers would have absolutely required photographs.” “Sometimes they were better ofi without them,” contradicted Miteson. < « Yes,” in response to our looks of in¬ credulity. “some were undoubtedly benefited by the absence of modern conveniences. Why, I myself owe my very existence to the tardy appearance of Daguerre.” Having at last enlisted our attention and silenced young Hysou, he rattled on like a bolt polisher. “You gentlemen have all been college and remember how blank and empty the world seemed when you first came out. 1 know I nearly died from sheer louesomeness the year after I graduated. I here are times when your heart goes out toward the oh! associations, and if there is a girl there you half like you begin to love her, and il you don t make her promise to write to you you wish you had, and if yon can t, remember her address you try to find it or guess at it. Isn’t so ? Even young Hyson admitted . that was aud sighed in the direction of the photograph, though he is only an uu dergraduate. “That,” continued the speaker, “is the way it was with a young man who was born away back in the early thir ties and consequently iu the days of eight and ten cent postage aud no daguerreotypes. He isn’t sorry for that, though, even if it does make him a pretty old man by now whom nobody but his wife dares to call Henry any more. “Education was hard to get when lie was a lad, but he managed, poor as lie was, to matriculate in au old college that is in existence yet not far from the Catskill Mountains. “About a year after he got his de¬ gree he was one day feeling blue, dr spoony, to be exact, thinking of Molly Sharp, whom he had flirted with in the silly fashion of a student. Then he saw in an old newspaper a personal to the effect that Mr. and Mrs. John Sharp, with thpir daughter Molly, had returned to Tarrytown after a brief visit to relatives in the East. The East in those days meant New Eng¬ land, and Henry was vexed to think that Molly had been in his own section without his knowing it. But he had her address now and could write. She could do nothing worse than leave his note unanswered. “It happened that when Miss Sharp read the epistle she was day dreaming over her memories, too. There was a certain Henry who figured in them largely. She, too, had gone to the little college up in the hills, which was one of the first co-educational institu¬ tions in the country. She, too, felt glad to get the address of an old schoolmate. So she answered as soon as maiden reserve would permit. “You can imagine how things went after that. They corresponded regu¬ larly. They recounted old interviews, stolen ones, of course, indulged in at their peril. The experience of every¬ body at school is practically the same, so I needn’t recount the particulars. Then they drifted to sheer lovemaking of the old fashioned, practical sort, in which the words husband, wife and housekeeping bore a prominent part. Neither of the young people was rich, and it wasn’t the custom to waste in useless galivanting and courting the money that should be used in purchas¬ ing household furniture. Besides, they had met frequently during the blissful six months of their early flirtation and were consequently as well acquainted as they thought neees savy. “Finally the day was set, and Henry, after three years of wooing, undertook the difficult journey to his intended for the first time. He arrived three days before the wedding and found her waiting for the stage, ready to ac¬ company him over the two or three lonely miles that lay between them and home.” Miteson stopped, heaving with in¬ ward laughter. “I don’t see anything funny in that!” cried Hyson. “I think it was rather nice.” He had voiced the sentiments of all, but we listened when the narrator recovered himself. * ( Nothing funny about it? Why, he found himself face to face with a perfect stranger, and she advertised to be his bride within three days. He had been writing to another Molly Sharp all the while. I told you that all people had about the same experi¬ ences at school, especially at the same school, and lovers are all alike, too, in one respect—they don’t write much about sublunary matters. So it was small wonder that he never found out his mistake until he saw her. If they could have exchanged photographs, it would have been different and the ro niance spoiled.” . . But what did he do?” asked young Hyson. “He fell in love with her on the walk home.” “And she,” I demanded—“she had been writing to the wrong person, too —er”— “You must ask my mother,” inter¬ rupted he, with the contradictory twinkle more in evidence than ever. “What yarn has my son been telling you now?” asked old Mr. Stebbins, who, with his smiling wife on his arm, entered the apartment. • My son! So that was what our host had said when he introduced the young man, who had just returned from abroad and was consequently even a stranger to Hyson. And Mite¬ son was just a name created by my fancy.—Doualioe’s Magazine. The llthnoloffy of Kissing-. The kiss was unknown, I think, among the aboriginal tribes of America and of Central Africa. From the most ancient times, however, it has been familiar to the Asiatic and European race. The Latins divided it into three forms—the osculum, the basium and the suavium; the first being the kiss of friendship and respect, the second of ceremony and the third of love. The Semites always knew the kiss, and Job speaks of it as part of the sacred rites, a3 jt is to-day in the Roman Church, The Mougoliau kiss. howeveT, is not the same as that which prevails with us j Q jt the lips do not touch the surface *of ,the persou kissed. The nose is brought into light contact with tbe c heek, forehead or hand; the breath is drawn slowly through the nostrils, and the act ends with a slight smack of the lips. The Chinese con s j der our mode of kissing full of coarse suggestiveness, aud our writers re¬ cr ari | their method with equal dis dain Darwin ami other naturalists have attempted to trace back tbe kiss to ; the act of the lower animals who seize their prey with their teeth, etc.—Dr. Daniel G. Brinton, in Science, i He Wears a Bell. ! A Milo woodehopper, who goes about his work with a huge cowbell attached to his back, says he means to take no chauces. “No fool shoots me for a deer,” says he.—Lewiston (Me.) Journal. ) PROTESTS AGAINST STATEMENTS ABOUT SLAVE TRADE. SOUTH WAS AGAINST THE TRAFFIC. The Bartow Man Calls Down Mr. McGee on Dlvere Points In His Allegations. Mr. Folsom gave an interesting sketch of Mr. McGee, the old slave trader of the Wanderer, who, he says, celebrated bis 70th birthday recently in Columbus, Ga., where he lives. As one of the invited guests, he could hardly do less than to write pleasant things about the old man, and as a graphic writer of light literature, he felt constrained to make the old man a hero if possible. The pressure of the press for something new and startling is very great, and sometimes these bohemian galley slaves have to ignore facts and deal in fancies. Mr. Folsom says that this old vet¬ eran has been an important factor in Georgia’s progress; that among other notable acts and deeds he took an act¬ ive part in our war with the Creek Indians and in removing them to the Indian territory, and that he was a promoter in the building of the old Monroe Ufostern). railroad (now the Macon and Well, now, this old man must have been a very lively youth and unusually precocious, for those Indians fought their last fight in 1835 and surrendered and were at once sent to the territory. Mr. McGee was then just nine years old. The Monroe railroad from Macon to Forsyth was built in 1843, when this young man was 15 years old. Probably he toted water for the boys or perhaps he for¬ got, and it was bis father who did these big things. But all this amounts to nothing. The important perversion of state history is his declaration that a large and influential portion of the good cit¬ izens of Georgia gave countenance to and encouraged the venture of the “Wanderer” in bringing slaves here from Africa. He can’t prove this by any respectable citizen now living. The slave trade was under the ban of all good people. Georgia was the first state that prohibited it. This was done in 1798, which was ten years before congress abolished it, and from then until the late war no respectable citizen ever thought of trying to evade the law. Georgia was and still is proud of her record on the subject, and would be prouder still if the “Wanderer” had never landed a cargo on our coast. Mr. McGee seems quite boastful of his success in reap¬ ing a harvest of blood money out of this horrible business. Seven hun¬ dred human creatures thrust in the hold of the vessel, packed in like hogs and dying by scores of beat, suffoca¬ tion, filth and homesickness on the long voyage and their carcasses thrown overboard to the fishes. All this Mr. McGee tells—and that they made a second voyage with similar horrors and similar results, and how he pock¬ eted $10,000 from each cargo. Con¬ science does not seem concerned as yet. John Newton, the composer of the sweetest hymn ever sang, was once a slave trader, but repented un¬ der John Wesley’s preaching, and never ceased to repent, and expressed his gratitude when he wrote: “Amazing grace—How sweet the sound — Tliat saved a wretch like me!” And when old and infirm, his friends begged him to quit preaching and rest. He said, “No, no! Shall the old slave trader stop preaching as long as he can walk or talk? No!” Even in Savannah, where Charley Lamar lived, who was the leader and part owner of the Wanderer, General Henry R. Jackson, as United States attorney, pursued the captain aiid crew and owners with unrelenting diligence for two years, but the free use of this blood money in some wav defeated tus purposes, Ash Mm n tins slave trade was ever favored or winked at by the good people of Georgia. So far from it, there were at that time and previous many good men who with Chief Justice Lumpkin at their head, were trying to formulate a scheme of gradual emancipation on Henry Clay’s plan. Another fact remains that all the ante-bellum citizens know to be true. The dealing in slaves as a trade or profession in Georgia was under the ban of public opinion. They were not altogether socially ostracised, but they lost their place, if they ever had any. < . Who is that man that is strutting around town?” “Why, he is a nigger trader,” aud that answer settled his status. His society was not wanted by good people. No doubt some of them were clever men and honest, but the presumption was that they were hard-hearted and of an easy conscience. General Forrest was a negro trader, it is said, and no doubt was respectable and reputable, but nobody ever accused bim of having high moral sentiments or emotions. His war record is splendid and there was no discount on his ability or his patriotism. Now this transfer of negro savages from the jungles of Africa to a civil¬ ized country was no doubt a blessing to them, but it was against the laws of Georgia and the United States and the agreement of all the great powers across the seas, and the mode and methods of it were horrible. Mr. McGee says that many of them died from grief at being, torn from their home and country. I well remember seeing some of them at work in Colonel Mott’s garden in Columbus, and my heart bled for then, for they looked forlorn and miserable. They could not speak nor understand our language and had to work by signs. Of course they became weaned in time and took wives and reared children, and occa¬ sionally we find some of these and their children here and there in our state—and they rejoice that they were brought from the dark continent to a land of freedom. Now the historian and newspaper men of this generation cannot write intel¬ ligently or correctly of the events of ante-bellum days, and it keeps the old men busy in defending the state and her people from misrepresenta¬ tion. Even our own children have to be told over and over again how we used to live and what was the true re¬ relation of southern masters to their slaves. I remember when it was the strongest incentive to good behavior for a master to tell his slave, “if you don’t behave better and do better I will turn you over to a nigger trader and he will take you off and sell you.” Folsom that Mr. McGee told Mr. the negroes cost them a dollar or two apiece in Congo—paid for in trinkets —and they sold them for $600 or $700 apiece when they got them here. That was a good profit if there is no blood money to be counted in heaven—no discount for murder by slow and hor¬ rible degrees. There were some feat¬ ures of our own slavery system that were bad enough and gave deep con¬ cern to all good citizens, but there was nothing to be compared to this importation from Congo and our pride has been that only New England bar¬ barians engaged in it. The eminent Judge Story once charged the grand jury in Boston that it was notorious that Boston people were deeply en¬ gaged in the slave trade and were amassing fortunes out of this blood money and it was a disgrace to their civilization and must be stopped. Next morning the newspapers of Boston lampooned him for that charge and intimated that it was none of his business. Boston and New Bedford continued it until 1848, and when they could sell no more to the south they sold them to Brazil and other coun¬ tries. These are the facts that have been kept behind the scenes while Harriet Beecher Stowe and Wendell Phillips were engaged in denouncing the south for defending slavery as a system. General Grant owned slaves up to the very date of their freedom, and they built a million-dollar monu¬ ment to him and sing his praises, but continue to abuse the south. What a curious people they are. All of Lincoln’s wife’s people were slave-owners and her brothers were in the Confederate army and Lincoln said: “If I can save the union with¬ out freeing the negroes I will do it, ’ and yet these same fanatics built a monument to him for proclaiming them free,though he said that he did it only as a war measure, The fact remains and will remain, that neither Grant nor Lincoln cared anything for the negro, and the fact remains that the manner of theif freedom has been their greatest curse. Of course we cannot expect the north to do us just¬ ice, but we cannot let the utterances of Mr. McGee ox any other southern man pass without a protest.— Bill Arp, in Atlanta Constitution. EUROPE WILL HELP SPAIN •Should Trouble Arise Over Demand For Apology. The Figaro (Paris) says: “No state could make such an apology as the United States demands from Spain without the loss of all dignity. If the United States should attack Spain under such a futile pretext as the De Lome incident the whole of Europe would support t he la tter.”__ ENSIGN WASHED OVERBOARD. J. R. Breckenridge, of the Cushing, Drowns Near Havana. The following cablegram has been received by the state department from Consul General Lee, at, Havana: “Ensigu J. R. Breckinridge, of the Cushing, was washed overboard aud drowned a few hours before the arrival of the vessel in this port. The body was recovered and I am arranging to have it embalmed and sent home. »t ANTI-FREE PASS BILL Will Still Be Enforced In the Palmetto State. A Columbia, S. C., special says: Members of the legislature and state officers must pay their fares on rail roads for another vear. At least the anti-free pass law which was passed dnring Mr. Tillman’s term as governor will stand. For two years the house has repealed this law. The senate at Friday’s session killed the house re¬ pealing bill. KO APOLOGY FROM SPAIfl Woodford's Demand For a Disa¬ vowal Turned Down. SPANISH CABINET DECIDES Barnabe Is DeLome’s Successor. Canalejas’ Letter Returned. Advices from Madrid state that at a meeting of the Spanish cabinet, hell at 5 o’clock Monday afternoon, over which the queen regent presided, Senor Gullon, minister of foreign affair , i n . formed the ministry that United States Minister Woodford had just handed him a note referring to Senor Dupuy DeLome’s letter and to the meaning of several paragraphs in it. The note from Minister Woodford demanded that Spain should formally ! disavow the insults to President Mc¬ Kinley contained in Senor Dupuy DeLome’s letter to Senor Canalejas. The cabinet council, after a warm debate, it is reported, decided unani¬ mously to reply to Minister Woodford that Senor DeLome’s spontaneous res¬ ignation and the terms of the decree j accepting it were considered sufficient 1 satisfaction. It is understood that Minister Wood¬ ford received this intimation and dis¬ patched a long cipher telegram to Washington. At the meeting the cabinet selected Senor Louis Polo. Bernabe as minister to the United States to succeed Senor DeLome and subsequently Senor Gul Ion, minister of foreigh affairs, sent a cablegram to Washington so informing the secretary of state. Better Sent Canalejas. A Washington special says: Monday night the state department received official notice from Madrid of the se¬ lection of Senor Louis Polo Bernabe as United States minister to succeed Senor Depuy DeLome. Senor Bernabe is a son of Vice Admiral Polo, who formerly repre¬ sented Spain in this country. Senor Bernabe is now engaged in a special department of the foreign ministry at Madrid, dealing with commercial mat¬ ters and consulates. Actuated by a sense of honor and a strict idea of justice, the state depart¬ ment has taken steps to place in the hands of Senor Canalejas, to whom the letter was addressed, the epistle written by Senor Dupuy DeLome, which led to the resignation of the minister. The transaction is explained in the following brief statement given out by the state department: “Recognizing that the legal ownership of the DeLome letter is in Mr. Canalejas, and his agent and attorney, Mr. Carlisle, having presented proper authority to receive the same, the letter was delivered to him to¬ day.” Mr. Carlisle was fully authorized to apply for and receive the letter, hav¬ ing the cabled authorization irom Senor Canalejas. In the view of the state department the letter was a stolen document, and in that, like any other piece of property, should upon application, be delivered to the right¬ ful owner. There was no other course left open, for in the United States as in all other countries having a code of laws, a letter becomes the sole property of the person to whom it is addressed immediately it starts on its way from the sender. Even the writer cannot obtain pos¬ session of it without consent of the person addressed; the limit of his powers legally being in certain cases to stop the delivery of the paper. GENERAL~STRIKe” DISAPPROVED. Recommendation of Textiie Unions May Fall Through. From advices received at Boston, Mass., Monday night from various mill centers, it seems to be the gen¬ eral opinion in mill circles that the recommendation of the textile unions that a general strike be undertaken by the operatives in all New England cot¬ ton mills where a reduction of wages occurred wiii not be accepted in all places. DAUNTLESS OFF AGAIN. Gams Little Tug Eludes Watchful Eyes at Savannah. The officials of the treasury depart¬ ment at Washington have received in¬ formation through Spanish sources that the suspected filibuster Dauntless has succeeded iu eluding the vigilance of the government officials at Savan¬ nah and has passed out to sea. The Dauntless is said to have a car . ammunition ... aud , other S° ° a ™ s , 8U PJ> he8 . “tended for the Cuban msnr uotlfied , J the he customs treasury ° &cers department aud reve has ' nue cutters along the coast to be on the alert aud detain the supposed fili¬ buster if possible.
