ing in his nap, as if pronouncing that closing benediction which we had all so long desired. Punch sat directly in front of me, his shaved cranium fallen back, and his small mustaches just visible above the rim of its polished circumference. If he had had any hair, I could have pulled it, and so saved him from the castigation which was approaching. A man came forward from the door, bearing in his hand a stout, short stick, with a knob at one end, and a fox-tail fastened to the other. From my knowledge of Puritan antiquities, I knew that he was the tithing-man; and I leaned back in breathless expectation of witnessing summary and fearful justice. One knock dispersed the dense slumbers of the Doctor; and then the club descended with thrilling effect on the unfortunate sconce of Mr. Punner. Gliding on, the official swept the fox-tail over the face of Mrs. Milyun, who was also gently snoring. The hairy extremity descended into her open mouth; and with a gasp and a gurgle, Mrs. Milyun awoke to burst into tears. The little Peppergrasses were then knocked on the head successively, to bring them to a sense of their situation; and as the two youngest ones broke into an angry squall, they were taken out of doors, and polished off with sprouts of currant bushes. Major Slick was the next victim of the terrible tithing man, who caught him slyly squirting tobacco-juice into his own hat, in the vain hope of escaping detection. Out went the Major, notwithstanding his woefully solemn phiz; and I saw him presently, through the window, in the grasp of that remorseless Red Breeches; his lamentable voice, as I thought, reaching me, a few minutes later, from the locality of the whipping-post. oversight both of these ladies had omitted to change their evening dresses before starting, so that they now exposed no small portion of their shoulders, and so forth, to the view of the congregation. The result was dreadful. The eyes of the Puritans flashed with anger and contempt; and I saw instantly that they had conceived the worst idea of these most respectable ladies. The tithing man advanced to seize Mrs. Milyun, while a particularly grim brother in the church laid hands on Miss Schottische. Mr. Milyun would not let go of his wife, and I felt bound to defend the authoress of the "Narrow, Narrow House." The result was, that we were all four bundled out, and led off to prison together. A mighty door of oak and iron closed upon us, and we were left to our woeful anticipations. "This is a pretty place to bring your wife to!" shrieked Mrs. Milyun at her husband. "I didn't bring you here," he replied, impertinently; "it was that fellow with the foxtail." "Well, what did you come to this hateful island for ?" insisted the outraged woman. "You ought to have known it wasn't a fit place for a lady." "All your own doings, my dear; especially this last scrape," returned old Milyun, coolly; "I have often requested you not to wear lowneck dresses." Mrs. Milyun finished the conversation by a scream, and Mr. Milyun by a growl. Then we became silent, for there was a sound of feet in the passage, and of a key in the lock. The door opened, and Doctor Armageddon was thrust in by the nape of the neck; having, it seems, been imprudent enough to commence a doctrinal disquisition, in which he immediately convicted himself of some rascally modern heterodoxy. Sir Harry Vane followed him, then two other grand fellows, then the jailer, and then our enemy in the red breeches. I looked at the stern tranquillity of the Governor's visage, so like a remorseless destiny, and cried out, in the famous words of Cromwell, "Oh, Sir Harry Vane! The Lord deliver me from Sir Harry Vane!" "Friend," he replied, "the Lord deliver thee from thyself and the vile company thou keepest." I endeavored to plead the cause of the ladies, and affirm their unblemished character. But it I was useless. They were tried and found guilty of shameful indecorum, with a facile rapidity that Judge Jeffries would have had difficulty in imagining. Doctor Armageddon was convicted, to his speechless mortification, of foul heresy; and Mr. Milyun and I were adjudged culpable of indecent disturbances during divine service. After three hours and a half, as near as might Out we went to the pillory, and there we found be, the sermon ended, and the final hymn was the rest of our company, alongside of whom given out. The heat in the building was by we were immediately made fast, with our feet this time so oppressive that Mrs. Milyun and nearly as high as our heads, somewhat after a Miss Schottische took the liberty of loosening modern fashion of American after-dinner retheir scarfs from their necks. By some unlucky pose. In the crowd before us, I observed the MAJOR SLICK DETECTED, ttle Peppergrasses sniveling again, and rub- "Wretches!" sniffled Mrs. Milyun, through bing the seats of their tight trowsers; from "Mr. Punner, I hope you which I inferred that they had just received some further miserable castigation. her brief nose. mous old Milyun. Do wrap my scarf around "My dear," sighed Professor Glace, "that was a narrow escape we had of being hanged as witches to-day. Our lost darling had liked to have ruined us." "Oh dear! yes; what a pity you ever lost him!" groaned Doctor Armageddon. "I wish I could git a hold of one of them little blue-skins," snarled Major Slick, ferociously, as we came out upon the sea-shore. "I'd rotten egg him!" While the Puritan younkers were egging us "Well, it's my opinion they served us all with their usual accuracy of aim, the sun de-about half right," said that honest, magnaniscended through magnificent cloudy glories to the horizon. Glancing down the avenue at this spectacle, I was surprised to see our friend Howard and the venerable elder once more, emerging, to all appearance, from the very centre of the excellent brightness. As they came slowly up the street toward us the extreme verge of the grand orb vanished from earth, and I heard the Governor ordain our release. But before the first of our ignominious ankles was withdrawn from its confinement, and while the stainless stockings and Parisian bootees of our ladies were still sticking through the bars, Henry Howard halted before us with an expression in his mild, gentlemanly face so singular that I shall never forget it. Though purified, sublimed, almost unearthly, it still recognized us and our condition; not with any pitiful shock, however, nor with any indignation at our re-der the condemnation of these pure and rightmorseless oppressors, but with a tranquil coincidence in our sentence, and a complete acknowledgment of our guilt. When we were freed, Sir Harry Vane addressed us with one brief sentence: "Go, and let this day be a warning unto ye for all the days of your life, lest a worse thing come upon ye." "I kinder reckon it will be, and no mistake," muttered Major Slick, as we hurried away toward our landing-place. "Catch me on this cussed island agin!" But the Major saw those detestable scarlet inexpressibles dogging us at a little distance, and thought it prudent to skip into a boat among the foremost: "My dear friends," said Henry Howard at last, "I can not help being surprised at you. How is it possible that you have all fallen un judging beings! I have beheld this day things that make time seem but an eddy of eternity, with no shadow of separation between. I have been admitted to-day into the mysteries of sainted souls; of men who once showed how it was possible to be in this world and yet not of it; men of whom the world was not worthy. Our language has no other term which could so justly name them as the word Puritans." "Puritans be darned!" thundered the Major. "I'm glad the confounded hard-headed old critters have died out. This generation an' "Well, Peppergrass, this is worse than living that couldn't git along together nohow. I don't in the country," observed Punch. "Fact, really-confounded sight worse," responded De Cockayne, who has a horrid idea of the country. Old Hinnom and his sons limped along with out a word, being completely worn-out by their long fasting and other hardships. "Oh, Mrs. Milyun! we have but just escaped with our lives," sobbed Miss Schottische, now quite overcome, and unable to recollect any of her soothing passages on death in the "Narrow, Narrow House." WHITE Ar my feet the ocean surges, All its breakers white as shrouds: Spreads the shadow of the clouds. In some distant white-wing'd bark. like to take my religion so stiff as they mixed it." "I consider Puritanism a regular shave," observed the hairless Punch. "Fact is," continued the Major, philosophically, "men of one century hain't no kind of business in another century. I see some good in death that I never saw before." Agreeing unanimously in this conclusion, we returned with great satisfaction to the comfortable temporalities of Nahant, thanking Heaven that we were well rid of the forefathers of whom we were not worthy! WINGS. Thus the ocean of to-morrow Far beyond all earthly things, Bright with rays of fairer skies, "IF SHERMAN'S GREAT MARCH.* Sherman had been cut off in Georgia or Carolina," said an ex-Confederate officer the other day, "he would have been set down as the greatest military charlatan on record." "Quite possibly," was our reply; "and so if the doctrine of the wise pundits of Salamanca had turned out to be true, that 'should a ship from Europe succeed in reaching India, she could never get back again, because the rotundity of the globe would present a kind of mountain up which it would be impossible for her to sail with The Story of the Great March. From the Diary of a Staff Officer, By Brevet Major GEORGE WARD NICHOLS, Aid-de-Camp to General Sherman. With Map and Illustrations. Harper and Brothers. the most favorable wind,' then Columbus would have been justly set down as the most foolish visionary on record. Somehow it happened that Columbus did not slip irrecoverably down the round side of the globe, but got safely back to Spain, and 'a Castilla y a Leon Nuevo Mundo dio Colon.' So, too, Sherman was not lost in the Georgia woods or Carolina swamps. Columbus was not a visionary or Sherman a charlatan simply because each proposed a feasible object, and employed the best means to accomplish it." the Great March in its military aspects. SherWe do not propose in this paper to describe man himself has done this in his reports. They are as clear as those in which Cæsar tells how he waged his Gallic wars, and almost as pictur- | look, with Major Nichols, at the commanding esque as the immortal pages in which Xenophon general: "What prophetic intuitions filled the describes the march of the famous Ten Thousand. We propose to present-mainly in the words of Major Nichols-some scenes and incidents in the march of Sherman. Passing over the marches and battles which won Atlanta, in September, 1864, and the subsequent operations which sent Hood on his wild expedition toward Nashville, whence he was hurled back so disastrously by Thomas; passing over the heroic defense of Allatoona Pass, where Corse, with only fifteen hundred men, fought from early dawn until noon a force of no less than six thousand of the enemy, and drove them from the field, leaving their dead and wounded behind; we mind of General Sherman as he paced the piazza of that house in Atlanta, utterly abstracted in thought, his head cast a little to one side, one hand buried in his side pocket, the other fitfully snapping the ashes from his cigar, are known only to himself; but certain it is that one bright morning we were awakened with orders to move. Hood had already crossed the Chattahoochee, and was forty-eight hours in advance. His objective point was then a mooted question, nor has the military problem yet been fully answered: perhaps he did not know it himself. There can be little doubt, however, that the leading purpose of Hood's march was to draw Sherman ALLATOONA PASS. away from Atlanta by a bold movement in our rear, threatening not only our line of communications but our base of supplies. He thought that he could retort upon Sherman his own tactics, and force him, for want of supplies, to give up the bravely-won victories of the summer's campaign, and force us back upon Chattanooga. "The battle at Allatoona was the decisive point of the campaign in pursuit of Hood. The same night, Corse, though severely wounded and suffering, went to Rome with his remaining troops. After the failure of the rash assault the rebel general passed by Rome, and threatened, but did not attack, Resaca-for Sherman was now close in his track. Hood effected a temporary lodgment at Dalton. Then, collecting his hungry, barefooted men, and gathering what little plunder he could find, he fled over the mountains and down the valley at the rate of twenty-five miles a day to Gaylesville, and thence to Gadsden, where he rejoined his trains, to make his fatal march toward Nashville. ga. railroad junction--when I once plant this army at Goldsborough-Lee must leave Virginia, or he will be defeated beyond hope of recovery. We can make this march, for General Grant assures me that Lee can not get away from Richmond without his knowledge, nor without serious loss to his army.' "To those who gazed upon the map, and measured the great distance to be traversed, from this quiet village away up in the mountains of Northern Alabama down to the sea, and thence hundreds of miles through a strange and impassable country away to the north again, and over wide rivers and treacherous bogs, the whole scheme, in the hands of any man but he who conceived it, seems weird, fatal, impossible. But it was at that moment in process of execution. The army was at once set in motion; the numerous threads spreading over a wide field of operations were gathered up. Out of confusion came exquisite order. Detachments guarding various dépôts were sent to their commands, outposts were withdrawn, the cavalry were concentrated in one division under the lead of a gallant soldier. Compact, confident, and cheerful, this well-appointed host, guided by that master mind, moved grandly on to the fulfillment of its high mission. Those who have written of this campaign always date its commencement from Atlanta. Inasmuch as we trod upon hitherto unconquered soil when we went out from Atlanta, this statement is true; but the march really began at Rome and Kingston." It is from this point that Major Nichols begins his diary. He writes: "Sherman waited some time at Gaylesville, until fully assured of the direction taken by his late antagonist. He then detached the Fourth Corps, and subsequently the Twenty-third, with orders to join General Thomas, who received full instructions as to the course he was to adopt. Sherman at once made preparations to abandon all the posts south of Dalton. From Gaylesville and Rome he issued his orders concerning the new movement. The sick and wounded, non-combatants, the machinery, extra baggage, tents, wagons, artillery, ammunition stores, every person and every thing not needed in the future campaigns, were sent back to ChattanooThe army was stripped for fighting and "November 13.-Yesterday the last train of marching. cars whirled rapidly past the troops moving "Let us for a moment look at General Sher-south, speeding over bridges and into the woods man as he appeared at Gaylesville, seated upon as if they feared they might be left helpless in a camp-stool in front of his tent, with a map of the deserted land. At Cartersville the last comthe United States spread upon his knees. Gen- munications with the North were severed with eral Easton and Colonel Beckwith, his chief the telegraph wire. It bore the message to quarter-master and commissary, are standing General Thomas, All is well.' And so we near. By his side are Generals Howard and have cut adrift from our base of operations, Slocum, the future commanders of the right from our line of communications, launching out and left wings. General Sherman's finger runs into uncertainty at the best, on a journey whose swiftly down the map until it reaches Atlanta; projected end only the general in command then, with unerring accuracy, it follows the knows. Its real fate and destination he does general direction to be taken by the right and not know, since that rests with the goodness of left wings, until a halt is made at Milledgeville. God and the brave hearts and strong limbs of 'From here,' the general says, 'we have several our soldiers. The history of war bears no simalternatives; I am sure we can go to Savannah, ilar example, except that of Cortéz burning his or open communication with the sea somewhere ships. It is a bold, hazardous undertaking. in that direction.' After studying the map a There is no backward step possible here. Thirwhile, tracing upon the tangled maze of streams ty days' rations and a new base: that time and and towns a line from Savannah north and cast, those supplies will be exhausted in the most at Columbia, South Carolina, General Sherman rapid march ere we can arrive at the nearest looks up at General Howard with the remark, sea-coast; arrived there, what then? I never 'Howard, I believe we can go there without any heard that manna grew on the sand-beaches or serious difficulty. If we can cross the Salka- in the marshes, though we are sure that we can hatchie we can capture Columbia. From Co- obtain forage on our way; and I have reason lumbia'-passing his finger quickly over rivers, to know that General Sherman is in the highest swamps, and cities to Goldsborough, North Car- degree sanguine and cheerful-sure even of sucolina-' that point is a few days' march through cess. As for the soldiers, they do not stop to a rich country. When we reach that important ask questions. Sherman says "Come," and |