author, destined later on to become an editor and a foreign minister, was then favorably known as "Agate," a correspondent of the Cincinnati Commercial. The vigor and vivacity of his style had already made him a great favorite, but this little brochure probably answered more questions and satisfied more people at the North than many a more ambitious volume. He travelled with the Chief-Justice to New Orleans and across to Charleston, saw the returned Confederate officers, all of whom said "they were going to get some new clothes"; questioned the negro, and found out what every one at the North wished to know (it had been a terrible dread), that there was no danger of a negro insurrection; in fact, he opened for us the long-closed South. This rare pamphlet is, perhaps, as important historically as it was useful at the time.
Chief-Justice Chase was born in New Hampshire, and my father had bought the ground on which our home was built of his grandmother, old Mrs. Janet Ralston, who lived in Keene, a shrewd Scotchwoman. When my father said to her, "Mrs. Ralston, you ask too much for this land," she answered, wittily, "Ah, Mr. Wilson, I notice no people gits enough for their land but those who asks enough for it"; and she got her price.
My father, when rusticated from Middlebury College for some boyish pranks, kept the village school in Keene for one winter, and used to carry a little light-haired boy on his shoulder to school through the snow. This boy's name was Salmon P. Chase. He wrote it largely on the history of his times, and when in after-days we used to meet at Washington, and he was everything that was distinguished, he always remembered this early friendship and treated me almost as if I were a relative.
As Mr. Evarts said of him, "he was always one of
