Franklin, Mass. Endowed Boarding School for young women and young men. Fine buildings, delightfully located in a beautiful town. For Catalogue, address the Principal, ARTHUR W. PIERCE, Franklin, Mass. Boston & Maine Railroad. LOWEST RATES FAST TRAIN SERVICE BETWEEN BOSTON and CHICAGO. ST. LOUIS, ST. PAUL, MINNEAPOLIS AND ALL POINTS WEST, NORTHWEST, SOUTHWEST. Pullman Parlor or Sleeping Cars on all Through Trains. For tickets and information apply to any principal ticket office of the Company. D. J. FLANDERS, Gen'l Pass. & Tkt. Agt. BOSTON. LEWIS WINSLOW NEWELL, Business Manager F. W. BURNHAM, Mailing Clerk C. E. TAYLOR, Subscription Agent A LEAF FROM AN OLD DIARY EDWIN C. BOLLES In the year 1858 I was in charge of an Independent church in the city of New Orleans. I had succeeded its founder, the Rev. Theodore Clapp, who had gathered its members from the dissenters and heretics of the population, and whose religious career had been for forty years a notable and picturesque one in that community. A more strangely assorted congregation rarely ever met under the roof of a Protestant sanctuary. There were Liberals, Unitarians and Universalists, from New England; business men from almost every Southern state; Creoles of French and Spanish blood; and a few families of Hebrew descent. There were lawyers, physicians, editors and bankers settled in the town, wandering speculators, inventors and promoters, men who sold slaves and men who were the secret agents of the Under ground Railroad. The life of the great southern city was never so full and feverish as then, and the religious as well as the secular pulse felt its throb and thrill. Just at that time New Orleans was nearing a crisis in its municipal affairs. Its prosperity, with the crowds that filled it in winter when the cotton harvest had been reaped and the planters with their families came in to dissipate in extravagant living the produce of their crops, had attracted the scoundrels and sharpers of a continent to the plunder of this wealth. Every form of vice was in the heat of its most brilliant campaign. Gambling ran mad. There was pointed out to me, in the great rotunda of the St. Charles, a cotton broker who had lost a quarter of a million in one night. What was new to the city, was the unusual violence and highway robbery which made the streets unsafe. The name Thug had just been used to designate the criminals who struck down and sometimes murdered their victims, even in open day. The police were too weak and few to meet the emergency, and their chief, a French Creole, (who was one of my church attendants) confessed his inability, with the men at his command, to protect the community from this new danger. The daily newspapers were crying out in every issue against the apathy of the authorities, and demanding that the citizens should take the matter into their own hands. And one morning a whisper ran over the town that this had been done. A Vigilance Committee had been formed, and a little later in the day its proclamations whitened the lamp-posts, fences and walls everywhere. The public was admonished to keep quiet and indoors at night for the present. Scoundrels generally had been warned to leave the city, and where they were notorious and especially offensive, this advice was personally given at the muzzle of a revolver. The afternoon journals gave notice of the organization, and said that the headquarters of the Vigilants had been established in an armed camp in the square before the Cathedral. During the day it was learned that the best men of the city were within the lines. Some of the most prominent lawyers, doctors and business men, with the United States officers employed as engineers on the new Custom House, as well as editors, who had been fighting the disorder with their pens, were in the array which claimed the right, until the city was made decent again, to supersede its regular authorities. The best advised or most cowardly of the gamblers, adventurers and ruffians crowded the out-going trains that day. But a large number of desperate men remained in the city, bent on measuring their strength with the Vigilants. It was reported that the Cathedral square was defended by cannon, and the mob determined to obtain artillery and attack the position. The battery of the famous Washington Light Artillery, commanded by Colonel Walton, had its armory at Lafayette square. The front of the building was like a modern fire-engine house, with wide doors, swinging open before each gun, to allow horses and cannon easy egress. The mob of roughs decided to seize this battery, and use it in the assault. They came, hundreds of them, into the street, and found the armory apparently undefended and quiet; rushed at the doors and attempted to force an entrance. At the first blow on the wooden panels, an order was heard within, and the doors flew suddenly open. There stood the guns, but behind every one a soldier with his hand on the lanyard, waiting for the command to fire, the colonel quietly daring with his eye the crowd to advance. Not a word was spoken, but the mob fled in terror, and when, five minutes later, the great doors swung into place again, the street was empty. That night armed patrols kept the streets, and the next day many citizens paid visits to the intrenchments of the committee. It was clearly my duty to go, in the line of pastoral work, as my flock had contributed not a few to the ranks of the armed reformers. I found in front of the quaint old Spanish Cathedral the square occupied by a rectangular fort, built of the Belgian paving blocks of the streets, with regular embrasures and guns in position, and all the elaborate order of a military citadel. As I had no pass to enter, I was standing outside, admiring the wonderfully regular masonry of the extemporized fort and chatting with the bystanders when I heard my name called from within. A young physician, son in one of my church families, was beckoning me, and when I came up, told me that my services were needed, as one of the guard, accidentally shot by his own gun, was in a critical condition, and was begging to see a clergyman. I found inside a regular military order and the United States officers in command. While I was talking with the wounded man and receiving some requests to be fulfilled in case his injury proved a fatal one, a sudden alarm was given and every man ran to his post. I was told that the cannon were double loaded with grape-shot, and could sweep clear the streets on every side of the square. Down the principal avenue which led from the American quarter of the city, a great crowd of men was marching in some pretence to military order. In front rode the commander, and behind him trailed a field-piece drawn by a score of men. When they were about 150 feet away, the fort challenged them and they halted, while the men with the cannon made a confused effort to get it into position. They gradually realized that their one gun was commanded by a half dozen, ready to mow them down by the turn of a hand; and one by one the gunners flinched and slunk away, in spite of the attempts of the man on horseback to hold them to their work. Then a kind of tremor or wave seemed to pass over the densely packed crowd behind, and like water when a dam is opened the whole living mass flowed away, leaving the cannon, and followed, as a rear guard, by their mounted general, whose gestures showed his anger and disgust. The rioters, like Opportunity, came once to the attack and no more. The Vigilants marched out and added the cannon to their armament. In a week the city was swept clear of its thugs and bandits. Some of the unclean crew were still lurking about Lake Ponchartrain and the nearest upriver towns. But most of them had concluded that almost any place would be for a long time safer for them than New Orleans, and were out of the way of doing harm. With certain precautions for the personal safety of its members, the Vigilance Committee was dissolved, having done for this Southern city what its prototype had done for public order by the Golden Gate. Although a man of peace, I was fated still to qualify myself to sing of "arms and the man." About a fortnight after the Vigilant excitement had died away, I was under fire, as I had almost been that afternoon in Jackson square. I was called to a |