The Deacon had a fresh cargo of molasses to be worked up, and a great many hogsheads then in from his country customers, to be filled with liquor. When he went home, he locked up the doors, leaving the distillery to his new workmen. As soon as he was gone, you would have thought that one of the chambers of hell had been transported to earth, with all its inmates. The distillery glowed with fires that burned hotter than ever before; and the figures of the demons passing to and fro, and leaping and yelling in the midst of their work, made it look like the entrance to the bottomless pit.

Some of them sat astride the rafters, over the heads of the others, and amused themselves with blowing flames out of their mouths. The work of distilling seemed play to them, and they carried it on with supernatural rapidity. It was hot enough to have boiled the molasses in any part of the distillery; but they did not seem to mind it at all. Some lifted the hogsheads as easily as you would raise a teacup, and turned their contents into the proper receptacles; some scummed the boiling liquids; some, with huge ladles, dipped the smoking fluid from the different vats, and raising it high in the air, seemed to take great delight in watching the fiery stream, as they spouted it back again; some drafted the distilled liquor into empty casks and hogsheads; some stirred the fires; all were boisterous and horribly profane, and seemed to engage in their work with such familiar and malignant satisfaction, that I concluded the business of distilling was as natural as hell, and must have originated there.

I gathered from their talk that they were going to play a trick upon the Deacon, that should cure him of offering rum and Bibles to his workmen; and I soon found out from their conversation and movements what it was. They were going to write certain inscriptions on all his rum casks, that should remain invisible until they were sold by the Deacon, but should flame out in characters of fire as soon as they were broached by his retailers, or exposed for the use of the drunkards.

When they had filled a few casks with liquor, one of them took a great coal of fire, and having quenched it in a mixture of rum and molasses, proceeded to write, apparently by way of experiment, upon the heads of the different vessels. Just as it was dawn, they left off work, and all vanished together.

In the morning the Deacon was puzzled to know how the workmen got out of the distillery, which he found fast locked as he had left it. He was still more amazed to find that they had done more work in one night than could have been accomplished, in the ordinary way, in three weeks. He pondered the thing not a little, and almost concluded that it was the work of supernatural agents. At any rate they had done so much that he thought he could afford to attend meeting that day, as it

was the Sabbath. Accordingly he went to church, and heard his minister say that God could pardon sin without an atonement, that the words hell and devils were mere figures of speech, and that all men would certainly be saved. He was much pleased, and inwardly resolved he would send his minister a half cask of wine; and, as it happened to be communion Sabbath, he attended meeting all day.

In the evening the men came again, and again the Deacon locked them in to themselves, and they went to work. They finished all his molasses, and filled all his rum barrels, and kegs, and hogsheads, with liquor, and marked them all, as on the preceding night, with invisible inscriptions. Most of the titles ran thus:

"CONSUMPTION SOLD HERE.

Inquire at Deacon Giles's Distillery." “CONVULSIONS AND EPILEPSIES. Inquire at Amos Giles's Distillery.” "INSANITY AND MURDER. Inquire at Deacon Giles's Distillery." "DROPSY AND RHEUMATISM." "PUTRID FEVER, AND CHOLERA IN THE COLLAPSE. Inquire at Amos Giles's Distillery."

“DELIRIUM TREMENS. Inquire at Deacon Giles's Distillery."

Many of the casks had on them inscriptions like the following:

"DISTILLED DEATH AND LIQUID DAMNATION.

bodies of those whose souls are coming there."

The Elixir of Hell for the

Some of the demons had even taken sentences from the Scriptures, and marked the hogsheads thus:

"WHO HATH Wo? Inquire at Deacon Giles's Distillery.'

“WHO HATH REDNESS OF EYES? Inquire at Deacon Giles's Distillery."

Others had written sentences like the following:

“A POTION FROM THE LAKE OF FIRE AND BRIMSTONE. Inquire at Deacon Giles's Distillery."

All these inscriptions burned, when visible, a "still and awful red." One of the most terrible in its appearance was as follows:

:

“WEEPING AND WAILING AND GNASHING OF TEETH. Inquire at Deacon

Giles's Distillery."

In the morning the workmen vanished as before, just as it was dawn; but in the dusk of the evening they came again, and told the Deacon it was against their principles to take any wages for work done between Saturday night and Monday morning, and as they could not stay with him any longer, he was welcome to what they had done. The Deacon was very urgent to have them remain, and offered to hire them for the

season at any wages, but they would not. So he thanked them and they went away, and he saw them no more.

DE

In the course of the week most of the casks were sent into the country, and duly hoisted on their stoups, in conspicuous situations, in the taverns and groceries, and rum-shops. But no sooner had the first glass been drawn from any of them, than the invisible inscriptions flamed out on the cask-head to every beholder. 'CONSUMPTION SOLD HERE. LIRIUM TREMENS, DAMNATION AND HELL-FIRE." The drunkards were terrified from the dram-shops; the bar-rooms were emptied of their customers; but in their place a gaping crowd filled every store that possessed a cask of the Deacon's devil-distilled liquor, to wonder and be affrighted at the spectacle. For no art could efface the inscriptions. And even when the liquor was drawn into new casks, the same deadly letters broke out in blue and red flame all over the surface.

The rumsellers, and grocers, and tavern-keepers were full of fury. They loaded their teams with the accursed liquor, and drove it back to the distillery. All around and before the door of the Deacon's establishment the returned casks were piled one upon another, and it seemed as if the inscriptions burned brighter than ever. Consumption, Damnation, Death and Hell, mingled together in frightful confusion; and in equal prominence, in every case, flamed out the direction, "INQUIRE AT DEACON GILES'S DISTILLERY." One would have thought that the bare sight would have been enough to terrify every drunkard from his cups, and every trader from the dreadful traffic in ardent spirits. Indeed it had some effect for a time, but it was not lasting, and the demons knew it would not be, when they played the trick; for they knew the Deacon would continue to make rum, and that as long as he continued to make it, there would be people to buy and drink it. And so it proved.

The Deacon had to turn a vast quantity of liquor into the streets, and burn up the hogsheads; and his distillery has smelled of brimstone ever since; but he would not give up the trade. He carries it on still, and every time I see his advertisement, "Inquire at Amos Giles's Distillery," I think I see Hell and Damnation, and he, the proprietor.

Charles Francis Adams.

BORN in Boston, Mass., 1807. DIED there, 1886.

CITIZEN GENEST AND NEUTRALITY.

[The Struggle for Neutrality in America. Address delivered before the New York Historical Society, 13 December, 1870.]

IT

T was well known that a diplomatic envoy had been commissioned by the new French Republic, and was on his way to America. The President had been advised by his Cabinet to receive him at once on his arrival. But neither he nor they had any idea that the chief object of the new mission would be to break up the very policy just formally proclaimed. The chief directors of that changing era of French politics were looking to this country for aid in their conflict with all Europe, and especially on the ocean, where they were conducting an unequal fight with Great Britain. To that end they had, in appealing to the old alliance of 1778, meditated to propose some form of convention by which, in consideration of an exclusive privilege of trade in the ports of each other, making a practical monopoly of their carrying-trade for us, we might be tempted to enter into a union which, however it might have been worded, must inevitably have made us, in the end, a party to the

war.

This scheme was not altogether ill-contrived. The popular current in favor of France was at the moment running mountain-high all over America, and even in the Cabinet of Washington it had its most earnest sympathizer in the person of Mr. Jefferson. Though honestly in favor of preserving neutrality as long as possible, he held doubts-and not without good reason-of our ability to preserve it against the feebly-disguised ill-will of Great Britain; and, in the event of a rupture, his disposition. prompted a close union with France. Neither was Washington himself by any means averse to this policy, in the last resort. A good field was therefore fairly open to the labors of the new envoy at the moment it was announced that he had landed from a French frigate at Charleston, in South Carolina.

And here I ask your pardon for stopping again for the purpose of making a single observation. In the relations between nations it is not quite enough for a Government to devise forms of policy and direct negotiations. However excellent they may be in the abstract, and however likely to insure a favorable result, if the organ of communication be not also well adapted to promote the object, the issue will surely disappoint expectations. This remark, true in a degree even now, was very

much more so in former days, when the telegraph was not at hand to vary instructions, remove sudden obstacles, and rectify casual errors. A signal example of its truth is given in the conduct of Mr. Genest, the new French Minister. He was quite a young man, not more than twenty-seven, had been well trained by his father in the Foreign Office, under the monarchy, and had entered the diplomatic service at St. Petersburg through the influence of his sisters, who were in the household of Queen Marie Antoinette. But he had imbibed such heated Republican sentiments, that, at the breaking out of the Revolution, the Russian Government seized an early opportunity to furnish him with his passports to return to Paris. This event probably recommended him the more to the Republicans, who had now come into power, and particu larly pointed him out as a suitable agent to serve their objects in republican America! That it was intended he should act as a fire-brand, there can be little doubt; but that he should run the career which he actually did, was by no means in their contemplation. In the year 1793, to go from Paris to Philadelphia, by the way of Charleston, South Carolina, was certainly not less out of the way than it would be now to go from here to London by way of Rio Janeiro. There could have been but one object in this détour; that was, to try the temper of the popula tion before going to the Government. If such was the case, nothing could have been more satisfactory to him. He was received at Charleston with all the attentions which could have been paid to the greatest benefactor of his race, or military hero; and his progress through the country to Philadelphia was one month's continued ovation. People of all conditions, and officers of state, crowded to cheer him on his way. No similar spectacle has ever been seen in any country before or since. And at last, when he reached his destination, a large part of the popu lation of Philadelphia rushed out to meet him at Gray's Ferry, and from thence to escort him in triumph to the city. Mr. Genest was neither crafty, cool, nor insincere. This incense did for him what it has done for many a better man before and since it completely turned his head. He thought he had nothing left to do but to dictate what he desired, and everybody would obey. He began at once to deal out commissions to the right and left, to fit out privateers, and enlist officers and men; to organize Jacobin clubs, and in every other respect to conduct himself in much the same way that he might have done at Paris. President Washington received him with all proper courtesy, and his Secretary of State for a moment seemed to have cherished visions of international amity; but they were both rudely wakened from their repose by the complaints of the British Minister, Mr. Hammond, remonstrating against the capture of British vessels by ships fitted out from our ports under the authority of this new envoy. It was plain that the proclama