The Grand Duke Alexis left upon its register the only autograph written in person in a public place, bestowing upon the institution the most extravagant encomiums, both himself and his suite of traveled and titled gentlemen pronouncing it a wonder and a marvel!

The Reverend Doctor Smythe, of Dublin, Ireland, when in attendance upon the Evangelical Alliance, visited the Soldiers’ Home of Dayton, Ohio.  Examining its magnificent libraries, seventy thousand dollar chapel and its hospital, the finest in the world, he was spell-bound.  Going to its music hall and listening to its band, inhaling the perfume of its conservatories, visiting its grottoes, bowers and springs, rowing on its lakes, seeing its aviaries with birds of all varieties of plumage and song, and driving in its parks inhabited by buffalo, elk, antelope and over five hundred deer; he exclaimed with evident fervor, “In the Old Country, libraries, conservatories, bands and parks are for the nobility; in the new world they are for the soldiery.”  And what nobler compliment could he have paid to our country and its institutions?

CHAPTER XX.

    “Farewell! a word that must be, and hath been;
    A sound that makes us linger; yet farewell.”

The summer being ended, we visited the friends of Mr. Arms in Wisconsin, after which he went to Grinnell, Iowa, in pursuit of his usual avocation.  My own delicate health made it necessary for me to be again winging my way southward.  Going to Atlanta, Ga., and making that my headquarters, I visited with marked success all the towns of importance on the various railroad routes diverging from this centre.  I then made Macon another headquarters, after which I canvassed the greater part of the State.

The forests were filled with flowering shrubs and trailing vines, the towering trees hung with the wild, weird drapery of the southern moss, and the mocking birds sang their sweet songs from “early morn ’til dewy eve.”  These scenes “vibrate in memory” with quivering, throbbing power, and come back like odors exhaled from fading flowers or “music when soft voices die.”

Selma, Alabama, became my third headquarters, where I boarded with Mrs. Cooke, a lovely woman of the purely southern type, who, before the great conflict, was a millionaire, and was afterward forced for her own support to convert a large mansion into a huge boarding house, which, with its hundred guests, was a cheerful, happy home; permeated as it was by the sunshine she diffused, and lighted by the fairy face of her lovely daughter, who was named for her native State, Alabama.

As in the aboriginal tongue this signifies “here we rest,” and it became to us a name deeply fraught with significance, for in this pure untainted heart we found “rest! sweet rest!”