orable campaign. They had left Virginia at the very moment the great battle had been joined on the Rapidan. Such conduct would have been despised as an exhibition of selfishness or cowardice in the South, and a regiment of Confederates returning home, under such circumstances, would have been hooted in the streets of Richmond. But the Yankee is too fond of "sensations" to analyze any moral question they may involve. The whole of Boston was in an uproar of delight to receive the returned regiment, which was escorted through the streets with all the military display the city could muster: flags waving welcome, spreads of canvas in the streets entitled "Honor to the Brave," handkerchiefs and parasols flapped from windows, car-loads of school-children, and a jam of omnibuses at each corner of the route of "the braves," crowned with admiring spectators. Then there was a dinner at Faneuil Hall, a speech from Governor Andrew, and complimentary honors enough to fill two or three columns of the next morning's papers.

Really, the most curious philosophy in the composition of the Yankee is his love of sensation: the most distinctive trait, too, of the nation, and one in such especial and striking contrast to the plain and serious manners of the Confederates. It has frequently occurred to me that an occasion of the sympathy of Englishmen with us in this war is the similarity of our manners, proceeding in each instance from the habit of a quiet and practical estimation of things at their right value. The Confederates are a people of habitual sobriety of sentiment, readily excited on due occasion, but much more by the inspiration of abstract principles than by the names of persons. How different the Yankee! I have seen General Lee passing through the streets of Richmond without a huzza and without any other attestation of his presence than that of his being occasionally pointed out with a quiet and respectful regard. I certainly never heard of a mob of admirers at his hotel, or a deputation of Confederate damsels to kiss him. But the Yankees must have their "big thing," and if there is nothing else to serve their appetite these people will actually exaggerate their own disgrace and caricature themselves rather than not have their "sensation" in the penny newspapers. We all recollect what magnified and gloating descriptions the Yankee journals gave

us of the footrace of their army from Bull Run to Washington -one of the first "sensations" of the war. And here we have a twenty-four hours "sensation" in Boston in the celebration of the return of a regiment of soldiers, who came home in the remarkable circumstances that they have not re-enlisted for the war, and have turned their backs upon their comrades at the brunt of the campaign.

The other occasion which took me into the streets was one of sad, memorable interest. I had seen in one of the city papers that two hundred Confederate prisoners were expected in Boston from the prisons in the West; they having taken the oath of allegiance and enlisted in the Yankee navy. I went to the depot to see these wretched men, and when I saw them filing through the dense crowd, with their emaciated faces and bowed heads, I could not find it in my heart to accuse them. There was the evidence in their pinched faces and flimsy rags of the devilish appliances of torture that had been used to break the spirit and impugn the honor of these unfortunates.

But in the behavior of the crowd which received them at the depot there was a lesson which I trust I may never forget. The poor fellows were ridiculed at every step, laughed at, assailed with contemptuous remarks, and had to run the gauntlet of the wit of butcher boys and greasy loafers, well pleased with their supposed superiority to Southern "barbarians." Such was the fraternal reception of those who returned to Yankee allegiance. And in this scene of derision at the depot I saw in miniature what would be the real consequences of the return of the Confederacy to the Union, and what meant for us the promised embrace of fraternal reconciliation.

Oh! my countrymen, death and the visitation of all other misfortunes and misery, rather than the embrace of our enemy! God spare us the pollution of contact with a people, who, affecting so much outwardly, have turned every thing to a lie, and who, ravening for our blood, smile and stab. Who could endure the triumph of the Yankee, the braggart exultation of the coxcombs of creation! Rather the grave cover us and our name, and our dear country pass away in the mist of blood and tears, than we should consent to this humiliation!

I had passed a week in Boston, entirely unknown and secluded, when an incident occurred that was to open to me a new and surprising interest in this Yankee metropolis. I was sauntering in the reading-room of the hotel one evening, when an amiable looking gentleman came up to me with a beaming face and whispered, "Are you not Mr. Pollard, from Richmond?" I was so taken aback by the plump question that I could not help answering "Yes.""I thought so," he replied, quickly; "some detectives here know you; hush, talk low-I want you to let me bring a friend around to see you at nine o'clock this evening." I signified my assent, and awaited with some interest an interview about which there appeared to be some mystery.

At nine o'clock I received in my chamber the gentleman who had so unceremoniously introduced himself to me, and who was, indeed, to prove a friend, accompanied by a gentleman whose name was already familiar to me as one who had suffered for his early and brave sympathy with the Confederacy in this war. There are obvious reasons why I should not mention here the names of these friends and of other sympathetic persons in Boston, afterwards found, who surprised me, not only by the warmth and delicacy of their personal kindness, but by their sentiments for my country.

I sat up with my two visitors until near three o'clock in the morning in conversation on the war, answering their eager inquiries of men and things in the Confederacy. The next day it was insisted that I should be introduced to a number of persons in Boston who sympathized with the South; and some of my countrymen will be surprised to learn that to meet these persons I was carried to the Merchants' Exchange, to the offices of leading lawyers, and to some of the largest business establishments in Boston. I may say here that in the course of two or three days I met at least one hundred gentlemen in Boston, among its most influential classes, who expressed to me an ardent sympathy for the South in her struggle for constitutional liberty, and an earnest desire for the acknowledgment of her independence as the only possible termination of an unnatural and unhappy war.

To no one could this have been a greater surprise than myself. I had long been a skeptic as to the opposition to the

Lincoln Government in the North, and had esteemed it nothing more than a demonstration of partisan machinery, in competition for office and power. But however correct may be this general estimate of parties in the North, what I was made a private witness of in Boston was sufficient to satisfy any candid mind that the Southern Confederacy had a party in the North of devoted and intelligent friends entitled to her consideration and gratitude. What was most remarkable was that these men sympathized with us not from infidelity to their own section, but on the high and intelligent grounds that the war involves the issue of their own liberties, and that the Southern Confederacy in this struggle represents what remains of constitutional law and conservatism in America, battling against a fanaticism which must at last be destructive of itself. A sympathy of this sort is valuable. There is, perhaps, other sympathy with us in the North proceeding from less honorable motives, the mere fruit of faction-properly entitled "Copperheadism"-which I am very much inclined to think is worthless and contemptible. "Sir," said a leading merchant of Boston to me, "I am not what is called a disloyal man. I want to see the South succeed because I want to see the constitutional issue she is fighting for, succeed. I regard General Lee as fighting our battles as well as your own, and if he is whipped we shall have a despotism at Washington which will crush freedom in the North, as well as independence in the South."

In short, I had discovered a circle of "secessionists" in Boston, and had been cursing the black desert of heartless crowds before my eyes, without the least thought that it contained an oasis for the despised Confederate. I was overwhelmed with kindness by my newly found friends, offered a testimonial dinner which I peremptorily declined; invited to charming country places and suburban rides. Alas, from this amicable diversion my thoughts were to be soon turned into a channel of bitterness! What could avail even the most generous kindness of a few individuals when I had been marked as a victim by the Autocracy at Washington, and the iron wheel of its torture was being prepared to crush out my life or grind it with all the unutterable misery that the imagination of despotism could invent.

CHAPTER IV.

COMMITMENT TO FORT WARREN.-Horrors of the Yankee Bastile.-Torture of "A Brutal Villain."-A Letter to Secretary Welles.

I was taken from a sick bed to my granite prison and sack of straw. I had been suffering for many months from nervous prostration; and so much had it been aggravated, by the anxieties of my situation, that I had taken myself to bed. I was lying there, the morning of Sunday, the 29th of May, when a deputy of the United States marshal entered my room, and commanded me to accompany him to 'Fort Warren. There was no explanation of this harsh and immediate summons, except that "orders had come to that effect from Washington." In vain I plead the confines of sickness, and sought the delay of a single day. "Could I see the marshal ?" "No." The orders from Washington were to imprison me "forthwith." "What was I accused of? Why was it that the other passengers on the Greyhound were so graciously liberated, and I alone to be sent to Fort Warren ?" The officer did not know. So, without explanation, without notice, without process of any sort, I had been selected, the single victim, to suffer for the Greyhound, while her master was off for Canada, and the other passengers had been permitted, without a whisper of investigation, to proceed in the same direction. Perhaps my imprisonment, under these circumstances, was a complimentary distinction; but I must confess that, at the time, I could not, as the Yankees say, "see it in that light."

In the beautiful Sabbath-day, full of sunshine, through the sparkling water, and along the green islands of the bay, I was carried to my prison-house, the sight of whose solid masonry, rising above the bright water, smote my heart with a strange agony. What a mockery all this flashing and picturesque scenery of Boston bay, as I passed through it on the way to prison. Through it all I could see the horrid maw of the jail