from beams in the ceiling.

"Is this your house?" I said to the Hebrew.

"I keepsh it now."

"By right or by conquest?"

"By ze right of conquest," he said, laughing; and at once proposed to sell me a bootjack and an India-rubber overcoat. I compromised upon a haversack, which he filled with sandwiches and sardines, and which I am bound to say fell apart in the course of the afternoon. The watchmaker was an enterprising young fellow, who had resigned his place in a large Broadway establishment, to speculate in cheap jewelry and do itinerant repairing. He says that he followed the "Army Paymasters, and sold numbers of watches, at good premiums, when the troops had money." Soldiers, he informed me, were reckless spendthrifts; and the prey of sutlers and sharpers. When there was nothing at hand to purchase, they gambled away their wages, and most of them left the service penniless and in debt. He thought it perfectly legitimate to secure some silver while "going," but complained that the value of his stock rendered him liable to theft and murder. "There are men in every regiment," said he, "who would blow out my brains in any lonely place to plunder me of these watches."

At this point, a young officer, in a fit of bacchanal laughter, staggered rather roughly against me.

"Begurpardon," he said, with an unsteady bow, "never ran against person in life before."

I smiled assuringly, but he appeared to think the offence unpardonable.

"Do asshu a, on honor of gentlemand officer, not in custom of behaving offensively. Azo! leave it to my friends. Entirely due to injuries received at battle Drainesville."

As the other gentlemen laughed loudly here, I took it for granted that my apologist had some personal hallucination relative to that engagement.

"What giggling for, Bob?" he said; "honor concerned in this matter, Will! Do asshu a, fell under Colonel's horse, and Company A walked over small of my back." The other officers were only less inebriated and most of them spoke boastfully of their personal prowess at Drainesville. This was the only engagement in which the Pennsylvania Reserves had yet participated, and few officers that I met did not ascribe the victory entirely to their own individual gallantry. I inquired of these gentlemen the route to the new encampments of the Reserves. They lay five miles south of the turnpike, close to the Loudon and Hampshire railroad, and along both sides of an unfrequented lane. They formed in this position the right wing of the Army of the Potomac, and had been ordered to hold themselves in hourly readiness for an advance. By this time, my friend S. came up, and leaving him to restore his mortified body, I crossed the road to the churchyard and peered through the open door into the edifice. The seats of painted pine had been covered with planks, and a sick man lay above every pew. At the ringing of my spurs in the threshold, some of the sufferers looked up through the red eyes of fever, and the faces of others were spectrally white. A few groaned as they turned with difficulty, and some shrank in pain from the glare of the light. Medicines were kept in the altar-place, and a doctor's clerk was writing requisitions in the pulpit. The sickening smell of the hospital forbade me to enter, and walking across the trampled yard, I crept through a rent in the paling, and examined the huts in which the Reserves had passed the winter. They were built of logs, plastered with mud, and the roofs of some were thatched with straw. Each cabin was pierced for two or more windows; the beds were simply shelves or berths; a rough fireplace of stones and clay communicated with the wooden chimney; and the floors were in most cases damp and bare. Streets, fancifully designated, divided the settlement irregularly; but the tenements were now all deserted save one, where I found a whole family of "contrabands" or fugitive slaves. These wretched beings, seven in number, had escaped from a plantation in Albemarle county, and travelling stealthily by night, over two hundred miles of precipitous country, reached the Federal lines on the thirteenth day. The husband said that his name was "Jeems," and that his wife was called "Kitty;" that his youngest boy had passed the mature age of eight months, and that the "big girl, Rosy," was "twelve years Christmas comin'." While the troops remained at Langley's, the man was employed at seventy-five cents a week to attend to an officer's horse. Kitty and Rose cooked and washed for soldiers, and the boys ran errands to Washington and return,—twenty-five miles! The eldest boy, Jefferson, had been given the use of a crippled team-horse, and traded in newspapers, but having confused ideas of the relative value of coins, his profits were only moderate. The nag died before the troops removed, and a sutler, under pretence of securing their passage to the North, disappeared with the little they had saved. They were quite destitute now, but looked to the future with no foreboding, and huddled together in the straw, made a picture of domestic felicity that impressed me greatly with the docility, contentment, and unfailing good humor of their dusky tribe. The eyes of the children were large and lustrous, and they revealed the clear pearls beneath their lips as they clung bashfully to their mother's lap. The old lady was smoking a clay pipe; the man running over some castaway jackets and boots. I remarked particularly the broad shoulders and athletic arms of the woman, whose many childbirths had left no traces upon her comeliness. She asked me, wistfully: "Masser, how fur to de nawf?"

"A long way," said I, "perhaps two hundred miles."

"Lawd!" she said, buoyantly—"is dat all? Why, Jeems, couldn't we foot it, honey?"

"You a most guv out before, ole 'oman," he replied; "got a good ruff over de head now. Guess de white massar won't let um starve."

I tossed some coppers to the children and gave each a sandwich.

"You get up dar, John Thomas!" called the man vigorously; "you tank de gentleman, Jefferson, boy! I wonda wha your manners is. Tank you, massar! know'd you was a gentleman, sar! Massar, is your family from ole Virginny?"

It was five o'clock when I rejoined S., and the greater part of our journey had yet to be made. I went at his creeping pace until courtesy yielded to impatience, when spurring my Pegasus vigorously, he fell into a bouncing amble and left the attaché far behind. My pass was again demanded above Langley's by a man who ate apples as he examined it, and who was disposed to hold a long parley. I entered a region of scrub timber further on, and met with nothing human for four miles, at the end of which distance I reached Difficult Creek, flowing through a rocky ravine, and crossed by a military bridge of logs. Through the thick woods to the right, I heard the roar of the Potomac, and a finger-board indicated that I was opposite Great Falls. Three or four dead horses lay at the roadside beyond the stream, and I recalled the place as the scene of a recent cavalry encounter. A cartridge-box and a torn felt hat lay close to the carcasses: I knew that some soul had gone hence to its account.

The road now kept to the left obliquely, and much of my ride was made musical by the stream. Darkness closed solemnly about me, with seven miles of the journey yet to accomplish, and as, at eight o'clock, I turned from the turnpike into a lonesome by-road, full of ruts, pools, and quicksands, a feeling of delicious uneasiness for the first time possessed me. Some owls hooted in the depth of the woods, and wild pigs, darting across the road, went crashing into the bushes. The phosphorescent bark of a blasted tree glimmered on a neighboring knoll, and as I halted at a rivulet to water my beast, I saw a solitary star floating down the ripples. Directly I