whom I had known in a Main strect restaurant; and he told me that he had no sooner put his foot on the passenger boat, which runs from Varina to Washington, than he was taken hold of by a pack of bounty agents, and that one Massachusetts man offered, if he would go to Boston and enlist as his substitute, to give him $900 cash outside of the bounty. "Moses" couldn't see it. The "smart" negroes do not enlist.

General Butler had much to tell me of his success in the experiment of negro soldiers. But outside the views of the negro question by General Butler and other Northern negrophilists, I have made my own observations. The most invariable, and perhaps the most important of these is, that the black soldiers in the Yankee army are mostly composed of the dregs of the negro race; that of escaped slaves, those who enlist are generally nothing more than the ignorant and uncouth plantation "scrubs," who can find no other employment; and that this black element in the armies of our enemy, if it is to be considered at all, may be taken as almost beneath contempt. A Yankee officer told me that nëgro soldiers were found to have an animal abhorrence of the sight, of blood; that in some charges they had been, as soldiers often are, pushed on blindly; but that if they once catch sight of mangled limbs and spirting blood, their imagination is at once shocked, and they are utterly demoralized.

To see these miserable creatures in the lines about Richmond, standing up to their haunches in mud, and rolling their eyes like lost spirits, gives one a very curious idea of the material of the army which General Lee confronts. The white element of that army is only a degree better.. I may say, that in all my enforced intercourse for many months with privates in the Yankee army, I have never heard from them any sentiment of Union," any echo of articles in the newspapers, any expression of so-called "patriotism;" their whole stock of conversation and employment, besides studies of obscenity, is to tell what they have made in bounties, and to count the days when their terms of enlistment will expire. If the veterans of the Confederacy are not able to smash up such material, black and white, as the Yankce army now takes into its composition, they might as well give up their occupation and go home in disgrace. The Confederate public can have no idea of the utter deterioration of this material since the campaign was opened in last May. It is such in the armies of the Potomac and the James, that I candidly believe if General Lee had good reason to assume the aggressive, he could break their lines around Richmond from one end to the other.

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The fate of Richmond, should the Yankee flag ever float over it, I am not left to imagine. I had heard that fate already decided in every Yankee circle of discussion. But while within the lines of the enemy's armies around Richmond, I obtained an expression of the designs of those who, more than the politicians, are to give law to the conquered.

It is possible that there may be some few fools who imagine that in Richmond, under Yankee rule, they might go on in the old established routine of their Lives, leaving politics alone. Never was delusion more false or fatal. It is perfectly agreed among the Yankees that if Richmond should ever fall under their domination, a test must be applied to it far more severe than has ever yet been enforced upon any portion of the Southern people; for it is this city which is regarded as the headquarters of the rebellion, and it is here where the Northern grip is to strangle "treason." It is certain that no one could breathe in the atmosphere of Richmond unless he awallowed the oath of allegiance in its vilest form. If he saved his property for a few days by that step, he would yet be given over to ultimate rain. He would find Richmond inundated with men who would be his masters in everything; Yankees would keep the hotels, publish the newspapers, sell the dry goods and "notions." He would be turned out of all employment, unless he might get that of clerk or understrapper to some "go ahead" New Englander who wanted cheap help. He would be kept under constant surveillance, and at the mercy of every enemy who might choose to tell a lie about him to the Yankee provost marshal. Life would become intolerable to him. From Richmond to the farthest corner of Virginia he would and the places of himself and his countrymen usurped by the Yankee; and even if he saved himself from the jail by oaths of allegiance, repetitions of the eid feudal "homage," or any other expedient of infamy, he would find himself pushed to the wall and regarded as an incumbrance and superfluity upon the earth.

I found more instruction than entertainment in the talk of the Yankee army about Richmond. I had access to many of its officers, who spoke of the war without reserve. And this talk was an unfailing ding-dong of what Yankee enterprise would do in Virginia after its subjugation. Virginians didn't know how to cultivate the soil; the Yankees would give them a lesson; the old estates would be cut up into 100-acre farms to give every man a chance. Some had new methods of raising tobacco, as they had seen it done in the Connecticut valley. Some thought the Valley of Virginia the most inviting country in the world, and had picked out their places to settle there after the war. This talk

was not intended to be offensive; for it seemed to be universally taken as matter of course that under Yankee rule, Virginia, by a very fair, logical conclusion, could be for nobody else but the Yankees, and that her former people were to be glad to sit at the feet of New England civilization.

An officer on General Butler's staff told me that whatever denunciations of Confederates Butler might have indulged in, he had a great admiration of Gen. Lee. He related a singular story to illustrate it. He said that some time ago General Lee had exposed himself on a line of earthworks, within musket fire of one of Butler's regiments. Some of the officers thought the men who recognized him should have shot him. Butler said his soldiers had done right not to fire on him-that he would think it "a crime against humanity to take the life of such a man as General Lee." Now this may have. been affectation. But what must be the general estimation of the worth and virtues of the man, who could give occasion, even, to an affectation of this sort from the lips of an enemy!

me.

On the 10th of January, it was known at the headquarters of the army of the James that General Butler had been relieved from all command, and ordered to report at his home in Massachusetts. The news was a terrible surprise to The flag-of-truce under which I was to be exchanged had not yet come up the river. General Butler's authority was at an end; and I had reason to suspect that if in any way it became known at Washington that I was en route for Richmond-that if any application for instructions in my case was made to any new authority, the probability was I would be intercepted, and consigned again to the horrours of close and solitary imprisonment. A terrible anxiety was upon me. But I saw at once that my only hope was to conceal it. If the provostmarshal was to telegraph to Washington for any instructions about me, the probability was I was lost. I knew he was but little aware of the circumstances of my case. I conceived at once the part I was to play. It was constantly to speak of my going to Richmond under the next flag of truce as a matter of

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course; to avoid the least suggestion of any conflict of authority in my case; to have nothing stirred; to talk confidently of my intended departure as a thing already fully determined and settled in every respect. Each morning at breakfast I made it a point to say, "Well, I suppose I will sup to-night at the Spotswood." I promised the provost-marshal to send him back from Richmond a bale of smoking tobacco. But while I thus spoke with the appearance of easy and good-natured confidence, my heart was gnawed by a terrible anxiety. I knew very well that my fate hung by a thread.

My success was even beyond my expectations. Without the least ado, without question of any sort, I was on the morning of the 12th January informed that a flag-of-truce was in the river, politely and comfortably placed in an ambuance, and in one hour was at Boulware's landing on the boat that was to convey me to Richmond. I did not feel safe until the provost-marshal who had accompanied me to the boat had taken his leave; which he did very pleasantly, little dreaming that the prisoner he had put through so graciously was supposed by the authorities at Washington to be groaning in solitary confinement at Fortress Monroe.*

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How can I describe my feelings as thus narrowly escaped, as it were, from the very jaws of destruction, I stood once more beneath the flag of my country, and saw lifted into the evening sky the spires of Richmond! That night I slept the sweet sleep of one returned to his home. And that night my heart long pent up with anxieties poured out, happily and reverently its gratitude to God.

*I arrived in Richmond the 12th of January. Some weeks afterwards I received by the flag-of-truce mail a letter from a friend in Washington, addressed to me "in prison at Fortress Monroe," and forwarded from there, giving an account of an interview at the War Department about my case. This letter was dated the sixteenth day of January. It said:

"My Dear Friend: I have been here for two days, exerting myself to procure some amelioration of your condition, but utterly without success. Secretary Welles, a humane, benevolent man, and a thorough gentleman, expresses regret at your circumstances, but says he has delivered you over to the War Department, and has no control whatever over your case. He very generously gave me permission to use his name in my interview with the Secretary of War, and to say he (Mr. Wells) had sent me to Mr. Stanton. I went to the War office yesterday. Mr. Stanton has gone to Savannah, so that I had to see the Assistant. Secretary, Mr. Dana. Although I was accompanied by his manner to me was such as to forbid my again appealiny to him. Indeed, he very promptly and imperatively told me NOTHING COULD BE DONE FOR YOU."

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This news of Yankee determination to keep me in close and solitary confinement--to let me rot in prison-I read, on the very day it was uttered, a free man in the streets of Richmond !

CHAPTER XX."

SOME REFLECTIONS.-The Hope of the Confederacy.

February 20, 1865. Some weeks before the publication of these pages, the writer returned to his home in Richmond with a feeling of exultation in his bosom, and bringing with him the deliberate and firm conviction that in the af fairs of the North there were elements of encouragement for the South such as no former period of the war had contained. He found this opinion, for some time, doubted by many of his countrymen, and but few of them willing to catch the inspiration of any idea which lies beyond the immediate impressions of the hour. Nor is this altogether strange. It is true that the elements of encouragement referred to may not be appreciable in a hasty examination of the situation, or they may have been sunk out of the popular view, while it has been too much occupied with the superficial regard of reverses and mishaps to our arms.

It is true that we have had a series of misfortunes and misadventures in the military field. Yet count these altogether since August last, and the sum of actual results, although in favour of the enemy, is not the least occasion to us for despair. We still cover the vitals of the Confederacy with powerful armies. The passage of the enemy through Georgia did not conquer that State. Hood's defeat in Tennessee leaves the situation in the Central West about what it was in 1862, after the battle of Shiloh. The capture of the forts in the Bay of Mobile has not given that city to the enemy, or even given him a practicable water base for operations against it. The fall of Fort Fisher simply closed the mouth of a river. The march of Sherman may, by a defeat at any stage short of Richmond, be brought to thorough naught; the whole country which he has overrun be re-opened and recovered, and nothing remain of his conquests but 'the narrow swath along the path of the invader.

This is all of the dark side of the situation for us; and when we estimate how much of it is to be attributed to the fact of incompetency on the part of