of a restless desire to find how we can make all we meet subserve our interests, we know no higher pleasure than basking in the sunshine of gratitude which our own unselfish service of our kind has caused to light and glow around us. Living under these influences, the homes that are now so often profaned by the reckless steps of vice and the hideous voice of discord would become what they should be, the highest, purest type a Christian knows of heavenly rest. Then should we understand that feeling which makes it unsafe to give voice to the songs of Switzerland in the ears of her exiled soldiery; the sentiment that makes the stricken foreigner beg his way back to his "Vaterland;" the unquenched desire that sends the outcast Jew in his death-hour to lay his bones in the desolate land of his faith.

LOUISIANA.

203

SARAH A. DORSEY.

(AYS one who knows her intimately, and "none know her but to

SAY

lections of Henry W. Allen:"

"To comprehend the organization that gave being to this book, one must have known the author- a woman highly strung, and yet calm; nervous, and yet courageous; sensitive, and yet not susceptible; and strongly practical and considerate of the common usages of life. For one of such poetic taste, such ardent fancy, and withal devoted in no ordinary degree and with no common fidelity to her duties, her friends, her country, and her God, she possesses in an extraordinary degree the faculty of friendship, so to speakthat pure disinterestedness of soul which enables its possessor to put aside all selfish considerations in behalf of its objects of regard, and to separate from any warmer or more sentimental feeling the affection that may so legitimately exist between the sexes.

"She had known Governor Allen from her childhood, is twenty years his junior, and was actuated in his service not only by friendship and zeal, but a sort of hero-worship, which our late disastrous struggle was well calculated to arouse in the Southern breast."

Sarah Anne Ellis was born on her father's plantation, just below Natchez. Her parents also had a residence in the suburbs of that city, where she was brought up. Her parents were both young and very wealthy, belonging to the oldest and most influential families in Mississippi and Louisiana. Her mother was Mary Routh; her father, Thomas George Percy Ellis. She was the eldest child, born before her mother was sixteen; therefore, being rather an earnest, grave sort of a child, her mother always declared "Sarah was much older than she was." Her parents were both gay, and much beloved in society. Her mother was a very lovely woman, and her father was very gifted and brilliant. He died very suddenly at an early age. Sarah was his idol, being the only daughter with two sons, until a girl was born three weeks before his death. She adored her father; his death made a deep and ineffaceable impression on her, even at the early age of nine years.

The dim outlines of the groundwork of "Agnes Graham's "* family story were Mrs. Dorsey's own. Her great-grandfather, grandmother, and aunts suffered in that terribly mysterious dispensation of God. The earliest recollection of Mrs. Dorsey recalls her grandmother, a beautiful, stately woman, with exquisite hands and moulded form, an inmate of her father's house, hopelessly melancholy, possessing everything that the prestige of birth, and rank, and wealth could give; but the "skeleton in the closet" was always there, and for years this dreadful thought pursued her, even from childhood, as it had all of her family (her gifted aunts as well), making their inner lives deeper and more thoughtful than the life of most people.

Her mother married Gen. Charles G. Dahlgren, afterward of the C. S. A., brother to the now Federal Admiral. Sarah was passionately fond of books, and was most carefully educated by her mother and stepfather. She had every advantage that money could procure. Her youth was very gay at Natchez, noted as the "society town" of the South. We are told that Mrs. Dahlgren entertained charmingly, in true, open-hearted Southern manner. She died of disease of the heart,

in 1858.

In 1853, Miss Sarah Ellis was married to Samuel W. Dorsey, of Tensas Parish, La.

From earliest youth, in common with most thinking Southerners, she has been deeply interested in the laboring class, and can say honestly, in the face of Heaven, she has devoted every faculty she possesses to their improvement, so far as she could, while she owned them. This she did as a matter of duty. She now does what she can for them as a matter of humanity. Every Sunday, in her plantation-home in Tensas Parish, she has a class of from fifty to sixty scholars of negroes. She teaches them to read and write, and religion. She is an Episcopalian, and believes a full ritual the only way to interest or reach these masses. Her husband lost nearly a quarter of a million of dollars by the war. They took their negroes to Texas during the "struggle for Confederate independence." They are devoted to them, and are still with them. Some of the experiences of Louise Peyrault (in "Lucia Dare") were real. Indeed, most of the Southern incidents in this book are true, most of the characters from life. The scenes in Natchez are merely idealized; any old resident can locate them.

*Published serially in the "Southern Literary Messenger," 1861, and a revised edition in book-form is at this time (March, 1869) in press.