Yet they failed so miserably, that every Kansas boy at last had his story to tell of the company of ruffians whom he had set scampering by the casual hint that Brown or Lane was lurking in the bushes.  The terror became such a superstition, that the largest army which ever entered Kansas—­three thousand men, by the admission of both sides—­turned back before a redoubt at Lawrence garrisoned by only two hundred, and retreated over the border without risking an engagement.

It is idle to say that these wore not fair specimens of Southern companies.  They were composed of precisely the same material as the flower of the Secession army,—­if flower it have.  They were members of the first families, planters’ sons and embryo Wigfalls.  South Carolina sent them forth, like the present troops, with toasts and boasts and everything but money.  They had officers of some repute; and they had enthusiasm with no limit except the supply of whiskey.  Slavery was divine, and Colonel Buford was its prophet.  The city of Atchison was before the dose of 1857 to be made the capital of a Southern republic.  Kansas was to be conquered:  “We will make her a Slave State, or form a chain of locked arms and hearts together, and die in the attempt.”  Yet in the end there were no chains, either of flesh or iron,—­no chains, and little dying, but very liberal running away.  Thus ended the war in Kansas.  It seems impossible that Slavery should not make in this case a rather better fight, where all is at stake.  But it is well to remember that no Border Ruffian of Secession can now threaten more loudly, swear more fiercely, or retreat more rapidly, than his predecessors did then.

One does not hear much lately of that pleasant fiction, so abundant a year or two ago, that North and South really only needed to visit each other and become better acquainted.  How cordially these endearing words sounded, to be sure, from the lips of Southern gentlemen, as they sat at Northern banquets and partook unreluctantly of Northern wine!  Can those be the gay cavaliers who are now uplifting their war-whoops with such a modest grace at Richmond and Montgomery?  Can the privations of the camp so instantaneously dethrone Bacchus and set up Mars?  It is to be regretted; they appeared more creditably in their cups, and one would gladly appeal from Philip sober to Philip drunk.  Intimate intercourse has lost its charm.  New York merchants more than ever desire an increased acquaintance with the coffers of their repudiating debtors; but so far as the knowledge of their peculiar moral traits is concerned, enough is as good as a feast.  No Abolitionist has ever dared to pillory the slave-propagandists so conspicuously as they are doing it for themselves every day.  Sumner’s “Barbarism of Slavery” seemed tolerably graphic in its time, but how tamely it reads beside the “New Orleans Delta”!

A Scotchman once asked Dr. Johnson what opinion he would form of Scotland from what strangers had said of it.