Let us lift our minds above the narrow limits of ‘party,’ and realize the mighty work which we have in hand.  Let the introduction of free labor to the South be in future the subject to which every thinking American mind shall be devoted.  Let them stream in by millions!—­the free laborers of all the world!—­there is room for them all; and the right of man to work never yet had such fair and just opportunity to have justice done it.  Agricultural aristocracy, supported by involuntary servitude and unsupported by manufactures, has been tried, and found worse than wanting.  Let its place be filled as promptly as possible by that truly higher aristocracy of industry and of culture which is at present common to Europe and our own portion of America.  The turn of the North to rule has at length come.  Let its reign be inaugurated by great, noble, and philanthropic efforts to extend the blessings of true civilization to all the continent.

I WAIT.

    I wait—­watching and weary, I wait;
      You wander from the way! 
    My heart lies open, however late,
      However you delay!

    I wait—­watching and weary, I wait;
      But day must dawn at last! 
    Together, beyond the reach of fate,
      Love shall redeem my past.

    I wait, ah! forever I can wait;
      Forever?  I am brave: 
    Time can not fathom a love so great—­
      It waits beyond the grave!

TAKING THE CENSUS.

Moses Grant sat in his vine-grown arbor one fine afternoon in August.  A fine afternoon, I call it—­a little sultry, to be sure, which made Moses Grant’s eyes heavy; but the hum of the bees that played around the white clover-blossoms, and the sound of the leaves as they rustled in the warm wind, and the richly colored clouds that floated around in the deep, deep blue of the summer sky, and a thousand other things which I will not pause to note, but which every observing reader has noted on many an August day, made the afternoon I speak of as glorious as any afternoon could be in all our glorious summer.

Moses Grant’s eyes were heavy—­or eye-lids, if the reader should be a critic.  He had brought a book from his daughter’s book-case.  He remembered the volume—­it was called A Book of a Thousand Stories—­as the one his daughter Mary read aloud one evening, when the witty turns of speech put all the company into the best of humor.  But, somehow, the wit had now lost its point—­the joke had lost its zest—­and let him try as he would to collect his scattered thoughts, and let him set his eyes on his book never so firmly, his fancy would go on long journeys into the past, and come back again, wearied more and more with each journey, till at last it had sunk to rest, and Moses Grant’s eyes were closed.  The bees buzzed on, the leaves quivered as before, and the great world moved in its wonted way, yet our hero did not heed it; the world moved on just the same, O reader! as it will one day move—­one long, long day—­when you and I will not heed it.