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It is the shadow of a human being with a black skin. He is a slave! For a moment or two the scene looks black! What is there to admire here in these fields of golden sugar-cane, of waving maize, of snow-white cotton? What to admire in those grand mansions, with their orangeries, their flowery gardens, their drooping shade-trees, and their soft arbours? All this is but the sweat of the slave!
The windows, now mere unsightly holes, made the tumbled and blackened dwellings seem skeletons. Doors lay splintered to fragments. Chimneys had flung their bricks everywhere. The artillery fire had not neglected the rows of gentle shade-trees which had lined the streets.
Incredibly elastic, the shade-trees were practising calisthenics, though now and then one outdid itself and lost a branch; thunder and lightning romped like loosed scandal; rain hissed upon the pavement and capered ankle-high.
Even the line of heroes is not utterly extinct. There is still ever some admirable person in plain clothes, standing on the wharf, who jumps in to rescue a drowning man; there is still some absurd inventor of charities; some guide and comforter of runaway slaves; some friend of Poland; some Philhellene; some fanatic who plants shade-trees for the second and third generation, and orchards when he is grown old; some well-concealed piety; some just man happy in an ill fame; some youth ashamed of the favors of fortune and impatiently casting them on other shoulders.
We heard the rippling song of some meadow-larks this day, the only birds of this species we remember having seen on the Western plateaus. All these ranches were laid out in true Mormon style, that is, squared off in sections, fenced, and planted with shade-trees before being worked. The roads are usually wide and the streets exceptionally so.
Here and there, lying thickly, as they fell, were the dead of both forces, easily distinguished by the different colors they wore, while gathered in groups, under the grateful shade-trees, could be seen the wounded whose strength was sufficient to drag them thither. This field was a shocking spectacle.
That no land should be sold to speculators who would not improve, but only to persons who would agree to improve in a specified time, and also to plant shade-trees in front of their places, and seed the road-sides to grass for purposes of public utility and ornamentation.
Its houses are built generally of adobe or wood, a few of stone, and though none of them are architecturally ambitious, almost all have delightful gardens. Both fruit- and shade-trees are plenty and thrifty. Indeed, from the roof of the Opera-House the city looks fairly embowered in green.
"I have realized the brightest dreams of youth." "God be praised! and you have forgiven my past folly, you think of me as preceptor, elder brother, friend." "My dear master!" I exclaimed, and tears, such as glisten in the eyes of childhood, gathered in mine. I was a child again, in my mother's presence, and the shade-trees of the gray cottage seemed rustling around me.
But the clean gravel-walks, the beautiful shade-trees, the green grass-plats, the sparkling fountains, the ornamental flower-garden, all conspire to render the place delightful. It is, indeed, a prison in one sense, but the children seem hardly to know it. Then, again, well-qualified teachers and superintendents are employed. The spirit which actuates them is that of love.
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