Mrs. Dorsey began to write for the press by accident,—a lucky one was it for the public. Writing on business to the New York Churchman, she ventured to answer a question propounded in that paper concerning the use of the choral service and full ritualism for negroes. She had adopted the full ritual, and had herself adapted the American liturgy to some of the cathedral services and music of the Anglican Church, and wrote her experience of five years' use of this musical science to the Churchman. The editor published her letter, and, in a subsequent number, another, signing the articles "Filia Ecclesiæ," daughter of the church. She liked the name and has ever since retained it.

Mrs. Dorsey has lived almost equally at Natchez and on Lake St. Joseph, where her family have had their plantations since the first settlement of the State.

All of Mrs. Dorsey's writings are Southern in tone and character, and have nationality, and are valuable, inasmuch as they are true pictures of that phase of Southern existence which is over and will soon be forgotten in the misery into which our unhappy country is plunged.

Mrs. Dorsey is passionately fond of study, but has necessarily been a woman of society and of the world, all her life. The friend, once before quoted, speaking of her memory of what she read, as illustrated in her "Recollections of Governor Allen," remarks:

"The writer of this book has so 'encyclopedic a mind,' so to speak, that her daily conversation is quite as much strewn with the result of her reading as are the pages here recorded. I have sometimes, when in her society, been reminded of Sidney Smith's remark about memory - when he termed it a wondrous engine of social oppression. Yet is she frank, eager, and artless as a child."

Her married life has been smooth and unruffled. She recognizes all of God's goodness to her, having had more than "the fourteen happy days of the Moorish monarch."

During the war, Mrs. Dorsey spent two years in Texas. While there, she aided in nursing in a Confederate hospital, and did such work for the church as she could. She travelled twice from Texas to the Mississippi River by land, once with her husband, two overseers, and several hundred negroes. The measles broke out among them; they had a very distressing time, and buried the poor creatures all along the road. They were frequently compelled to encamp for days and weeks at a time. She had a tent made of a piece of carpet, but

it did not always protect them, as it was not water-tight. Mr. Dorsey had to leave her to go after some negroes in the northern part of the State, and she was alone with the overseers and negroes for ten days in the immense pine forests of Winn Parish.

In 1860, Mrs. Dorsey sent to New York, to be published for gratuitous distribution, the choral services she had arranged and used so successfully among her negroes for years. The now Bishop of Florida had charge of this for her, but the intended publisher failed, and the war came, and the service remained unpublished. She is an enthusiastic Episcopalian, and was a dear friend of the lamented BishopGeneral Leonidas Polk. She is very much interested in the establishment of an order of deaconesses, connected with the church in New Orleans, which was her reason for making Agnes Graham (in the novel heretofore alluded to) end as one. This effort she desires to make in obedience to a promise exacted from her by Bishop Polk, on his last visit to her, in 1860, "that she should do everything in her power, as long as she lived, toward the establishment of a Sisterhood of Mercy in New Orleans." The bishop considered this a matter of primary importance to the Church and Protestantism.

During the war, Mrs. Dorsey's house was burned in a skirmish, and several men killed in her flower-gardens.

She is a highly accomplished lady, reading six languages, though by no means a pedant-a musician, performing on the harp with the same exquisite taste as "Agnes Graham" is described as doing. We quote the

passage:

"The young lady, after passing her fingers lightly over the strings of the harp, took her seat and played a brilliant, merry polka. . . . Striking a few modulations upon the strings, the music changed from the gay polka movement to a slow, plaintive measure. The red lips parted, and breathed most touchingly the exquisite melancholy strain of Schubert's Wanderer.' The song ended, the chords swelled on the air. She sang the scena and aria from Der Freischütz, Wie nahte mir der Schlummer bevor ich ihn gesehn.' It is a gem of music, and it was sung to perfection. The joyous allegro movement at the close, 'All meine Pulse schlagen,' was admirably rendered."

She uses her pencil like a born artist!* And yet Mrs. Dorsey is by no means a "literary lady," as that term is often used, priding herself much upon her domestic qualities, being a capital nurse for the

The vignette title-page of this volume was drawn and painted by Mrs. Dorsey.

sick, a good teacher, an excellent housekeeper, and, when it is necessary, a superb cook.

In 1866, Mrs. Dorsey published, through M. Doolady, New York, "Recollections of Henry Watkins Allen, Brigadier-General Confederate States Army, Ex-Governor of Louisiana," of which volume the private secretary and friend of Governor Allen thus speaks:

"It is the most faithful and thorough portrait of him that could be drawn, the best word-likeness that has been produced this century. It is accurate in point of fact; it is full in materials; it is tasteful in arrangement. The coldest critic cannot deny it the merit of sincerity and strict adherence to truth. The most exacting literary critic would stultify himself if he were to say that he found no beauties in the style, no pathos."

Reading a copy of this volume after a friend of the author has read and wept over it, we find many passages "pencilled," with remarks made on the same. Speaking of the burial of a brother of Henry Allen on the prairie of Texas, the author says (pp. 26 & 27):

"It is a pleasant resting-place,- one of those Texan prairies,— they are so thick with bloom and verdure. In that dry atmosphere the wild flowers seem peculiarly fragrant. Bulbs abound—hibiscus, glowing crimson; narcissi, a sort of blue narcissus with a golden centre; ornithigalliums of finerayed corollas double as daisies, white, with chalices of tender lilac bordered with green, so delicate they droop in the plucking; crimson poppy mallows, hanging their heads heavily, as Clyte did hers in the Greek sculptor's thought, on their long, slender, hairy footstalks; purple iris, small, Tyriandyed, flecked with white and gold dots; larkspurs, pink, and white, and blue; pale, flesh-colored prairie-pinks; long, full racemes of straw-colored cassias; great bunches of light papilionaceous blossoms, set in ovate leaves of light olive-green; starry heleniums; coreopsis too, yellow, eight-cleft, darkening into brown-red disk florets; foxgloves, white and violet-spotted; pink and purple campanaulas, cymes of golden bloom, like English wallflowers; paniales of downy, azure, four-petalled blossoms, like Swiss forgetme-nots; bull-nettles, with prickly runcinate leaf, guarding a tender, snowwhite, soft bloom, which rivals the Indian jasmine in its exquisite fragrance and graceful beauty. All sorts of salvias, verbenas, mints, and wild balms grow profusely on those prairies, mingled with the delicate, fine-leaved, closecreeping vines of the lemon-colored and pink-blossomed, vanilla-scented sensitive plants (mimosas), and the rich green of the musquite and gamma grasses, making a lovely covering even over graves. And above all this blossoming earth stretches out a vast dome of clear blue sky, vast as the horizon on the 'wide, open sea.""

To which the friend pencils: "She writes con amore here. There is not a flower among all of those mentioned that she has not painted to the life."

ALLEN.

"What Allen lost on earth of love and hope, he seemed to lay up with childlike trust in the hands of the Divine All-Father! He had the most unquestioning faith in the received doctrines of Christianity. He believed in God, in Christ, in the restitution of all things, in the immortality of the soul, and the resurrection of the body. He did not like to hear these vital questions of religion attacked or even discussed philosophically; he became restless, uneasy, impatient under such arguments. His own soul was so permeated with simplest faith, that he had neither pity, patience, nor sympathy with doubtings or infidelity in any form. This is a very rare and beautiful trait among men; especially was it so in Allen, who had never taken time nor had interest enough in doubt to study closely the vast, perplexing questions of theology, which, after all, generally prove to be a Dædalian labyrinth to all those who enter its winding paths, and which almost deserves to have inscribed above its doorway the doleful inscription:

'Lasciate ogni speranza voi chi entrate;'

a labyrinth where is seldom found an Ariadne with a golden clue, or still fairer Beatrice, to guide one upward into lovelier resplendent regions of everlasting light. Allen knew no more of religion than what his mother had taught him; neither was he an adherent of any church or sect. His life had probably been controlled by as pure principles as that of most men. Mistakes he made, errors he was guilty of, but his faults were of such a quality as only made friends smile and love him better than before. And his enemies, if he had any, could never accuse him of anything premeditated, calculated, malignant, or bitter. And the eye of the Great Impartial Judge has probably made sufficient allowance for impetuosities of temper and fire of organization in one of his creatures who never claimed to be all-perfect. A fermenting nature he had - rapid, rushing as a mountain-torrent, hurrying along the narrow, rocky channel of life, eager, restless, ambitious, dashing itself clear and pure against obstructions, until at last it lay calm in its crystal transparence, and was a still mirror to reflect the soft moonlight and steady radiance of the stars of Eternal Truth and Divine Beauty. It must ever be so where faith in God, in man, and in one's self make the substratum of a nature. Integrity, love, and truth have preservative and clarifying prop

erties like alum and charcoal in muddiest waters, or like the innate refining qualities in pure grape-juice. They perhaps increase the fermentation for a while, but leave the true wine of life clear and sparkling upon the lees at last."

GENOA.

"Gustave Pierre Toutant Beauregard is a descendant, on the maternal side, of the ducal family of the Reggios of Genoa. Beautiful Genoa! who has sat, a crowned queen, on the side of her mountains so many, many centuries, with the blue Mediterranean kissing her feet, and tossing in homage before her all the treasures of commerce of the world, its spices and pearls, its silks, its jewels, gems of art and perennial beauty, bearing riches to her—to her, throned on the everlasting hills, on the crests of its sapphire waves- those azure waves on which once sailed the mimic fleet of ships and straws made by the child Columbus in his merry play, before the dream of the undiscovered world ever rose before his spirit. It is but a step from the home of Columbus to the former palace of the Reggios; and just below, close by the sea, stands yet the ancient mansion of Andrea Doria."

Mrs. Dorsey has seen all this and enjoyed it!

SOUTHERN WOMEN.

"Miss had waded in water up to her waist more than once, and walked miles to carry warnings to Harrison's pickets. After the skirmish at New Carthage, Mrs. learned that Harrison, being compelled to retreat, had left the dead body of a young Confederate soldier lying unburied at New Carthage. She and her niece got in a 'dug-out,' a very dangerous sort of a craft for any but an Indian to paddle, rowed themselves several miles down the bayou, went to the Federal commander, and asked for the body of the young Confederate, which was lying out on the levee, where he had fallen. They received permission to take it. These modern Antigones lifted it up, laid it carefully in their canoe, rowed back home, dug a grave, and buried it. Two months after, I saw these ladies camped by the roadside in Franklin Parish, with a few boards over their heads as a temporary shelter from the rain and sun; lying at night on the ground, with only a blanket between them and the earth, and a 'cashmere shawl' as a covering for themselves and two little children; living on corn-bread and bacon; homeless, but cheerful, strong, and brave; without a change of clothing, until they procured some homespun to make some garments. They had lost everything but their courage and their patriotism. Then