humiliating.  In their case, we shall have little need to concern ourselves about the wishes of a local majority.  The fact that a majority are blacks, to begin with, must deprive that consideration of all its force, even to their own apprehension.  It will not be the first time that they have received a benefit which did not agree with the wishes of the greater part of those upon whom it was bestowed.  The men of Rhode Island and Massachusetts who achieved the independence of South Carolina did not stop to consider whether a majority of her white inhabitants were Tories.

When we hear that the colonel of a regiment of Secessionists sends a flag of truce to Fort Monroe to ask for the return of his fugitive slaves under the Constitution and laws of the United States, a painful doubt must be suggested whether such gentlemen really believe themselves to be so wholly and utterly out of the Union as the theory of Secession would indicate.  And when the novel, but very sensible doctrine with which that singular demand was met, that slaves are to be regarded as articles contraband of war, chattels capable of a military use, a kind of locomotive gun-carriages and intrenching-tools, and as such to be taken and confiscated when found belonging to armed rebels, shall have been practically applied for a time, with its natural and obvious result, it may be that even the Palmetto State will exhibit some general symptoms of returning reason.

THEODORE WINTHROP.

Theodore Winthrop’s life, like a fire long smouldering, suddenly blazed up into a clear, bright flame, and vanished.  Those of us who were his friends and neighbors, by whose firesides he sat familiarly, and of whose life upon the pleasant Staten Island, where he lived, he was so important a part, were so impressed by his intense vitality, that his death strikes us with peculiar strangeness, like sudden winter-silence falling upon these humming fields of June.

As I look along the wooded brook-side by which he used to come, I should not be surprised, if I saw that knit, wiry, light figure moving with quick, firm, leopard tread over the grass,—­the keen gray eye, the clustering fair hair, the kind, serious smile, the mien of undaunted patience.  If you did not know him, you would have found his greeting a little constrained,—­not from shyness, but from genuine modesty and the habit of society.  You would have remarked that he was silent and observant rather than talkative; and whatever he said, however gay or grave, would have had the reserve of sadness upon which his whole character was drawn.  If it were a woman who saw him for the first time, she would inevitably see him through a slight cloud of misapprehension; for the man and his manner were a little at variance.  The chance is that at the end of five minutes she would have thought him conceited.  At the end of five months she would have known him as one of the simplest and most truly modest of men.