Whilst he fights for slavery the value of his
slaves is dwindling down. Cotton being now
actually reshipped from British to American
ports, the Southern, when he presents himself
once more in the markets of Great Britain, may
find all the stall-room occupied. He may have
lost the customer who bought five-sevenths of his
produce. Ten or eleven years ago he boasted
that by spinning and weaving his own cotton he
could destroy the prosperity of British manufactures;
and now he has lost already his monopoly
of the government of his country, and,
whether successful or defeated in the war he is
waging, is apparently destined soon to lose,
and perhaps irrecoverably, the monopoly of the
cotton supply. This will also give to the slavery
question its ultimate solution.

Not the least interesting of the American
planters' rivals are the free blacks, who have set
up a society for promoting the cultivation of
cotton in Central Africa. Although the
numbers of the slaves in the Southern States had
increased from two and a half to four millions,
and the price of an able-bodied slave risen
during the last quarter of a century from
nine hundred to fourteen hundred dollars, the
planters could, in 1860, grow a pound of
middling cotton for six cents, or threepence, and
sell it for twenty cents, or tenpence, at Liverpool.
After considering these facts, many free
negroes of the United States felt desirous of
going to Africa, and growing cotton where the
plant is indigenous and perennial; and a party
actually went there last year, and set themselves
up in Yoruba, Central Africa. If this place be
the Yoribah defied in the war song of the
Amazons of Dahomey—

The Yoribahs must have been drunk to say
Dahomey feared them,
They could conquer Dahomey

—the Yorubas who shall successfully set up
cotton plantations in Africa will in the end
conquer Dahomey. Let the Amazons sing
what they may, the free negro planters will ere
long put down slave hunts, by which thousands
of youths are kidnapped and sold as slaves, and
grand customs in which enough of human blood
is shed to float canoes in honour of the ghosts
of dead kings.

With regard to the cotton supply this much
may be added: Asia and Africa and the climate
in which the shrub is indigenous and perennial
ought to supply cotton more cheaply and
plentifully than a country in which it is only
acclimated; the British race have, moreover,
everything their own way in India, and have won the
name of the friends of the blacks in Africa, it
can only, therefore, be by their own fault should
they be balked of abundant crops of cotton
and multitudes of free and efficient hands to
clean it. Through, then, the powder-clouds in
America, and notwithstanding the stillness of
the short-time mills at home, a hopeful spirit
may discern the signs of better days in store
for all men, and especially the varieties of
mankind whose skins have been dyed black by the sun.

Thomas Clarkson, when a venerable, grey,
and grand-looking octogenarian, addressed to a
large meeting in London his advice, almost in
dying, to put down slavery and the slave trade
by growing free-labour cotton; and the course
of events is apparently accomplishing his wishes,
by compelling the cotton trade to seek their
supplies from the resources and the soils of free
labour.

KERLI'S PEAK.

AMONG the larches and pines of the tough
ban forest, wherein never stroke of axe may
break the barrier that keeps the gathering snows
of the mountain peak from sliding ruin down
over the fertile slopes below, there lived once
an old man who had a quarrel with the world.
He had been a spice-merchant, perhaps a
magician, in some far, far away town, said the
villagers to one another. There he had feasted
emperors and kings in mid-winter under the
apple-blossoms of his orchard, with an orchestra
of birds, perched in a shrubbery of growing
cinnamon, nutmegs, and cloves, to make the music.
Also a carpet of sweet violets threaded with
lilies of the valley, yielding perfumes to the
summer wind that blew the porridge of his
guests. These villagers knew little choice of
food, and their imagination, left to its own
working, set porridge on the table at a feast
given to emperors by a man whom they found
avoiding meat and wine. So we may suppose that
they were helped by somebody, certainly not by
the old man Kerli himself, for him they had
never seen, to the tale of the birds and the
winter blossoms.

Here, in fact, with a leathern bag on the floor
by his side, sits the youth who helped them.
Swarthy and vigorous, with a black down, upon
his chin, he sits among the fair-haired gossips
at a table in the village inn. A knife and fork
are laid on a clean napkin before him in that
coziest of inns, The Heart's Content, which
fronts the well-fenced road above the mountain
torrent. The torrent far below roars round
about great boulders, and flashes down abyss
after abyss into the deepest, narrowest, and
darkest hollow of the gorge.

"Behold, Ishmael, a flask of wine!" says
Christopher, mine host. "Into the bag with
it! Carry up no more water if you want to
warm your master's heart."

"True for you, landlord," explains Martin
the Farrier, who is the village doctor too. "For
the heart lying over the stomach, if you pour
cold water into the stomach you will chill that
which is upon it. Also the heart is as a tub
under the stomach, and when the cold water
gets pumped into that bucket, you see, and
mixes with the blood, whereby the body is
rinsed inside with cold blood and water, up
comes a chill and a shudder to the very tips of
the nails."

"That is to say, doctor," adds the landlady,
"when a man is not frozen all over the outside of
his body, as Kerli must be up at the peak. I
should guess that the ice was an inch thick all