a superior officer. Finally I reluctantly crawled out and helped them, but they appeared to have no gratitude, for as soon as we had everything tight and strong they both seized me unawares and pitched me out head first into the rain, and for some time they kept me dancing around that tent, every entrance barred by the point of the Major's sabre or the wrong end of the Doctor's camp stool; and when at last they let me in, thoroughly drenched, I went to bed with a very bad opinion of practical jokes. THE ers. CHAPTER XX. JEFF. DAVIS. Ye fond adorer's of departed fame, Say, yc zealots to the worth of yore, HE light of future days, when it illumines the mystic recesses of the past, frequently reverses our judgment of events and destroys some idol of the hero worshipAnd yet, to form a correct opinion of the men who have engaged in those transactions called "history," we must reproduce the scenes through which they passed, and recall the temptations and trials which they withstood. From either standpoint, the character and services of Jefferson Davis will court and sustain the closest and most rigid scrutiny. He played a leading part in the history of his country; he has stood forth prominently as one of its representative men; he led a great people through a mighty war, under such unheard-of difficulties as were never encountered in equal magnitude by any people before; his leadership has been implicitly followed in adversity as well as in prosperity, by men to whom the world has granted the guerdon of undoubted ability, and both friend and foe have been forced to concede to him that honesty of purpose and integrity of principle that have characterized all men whose names have been engraved in golden letters upon the sacred tablets of patriotism. The first time that I saw him was on the 24th of December, 1862, at Grenada, Miss., amid rolling clouds of densest dust, seated on his horse by the side of the portly Price. A thin, spare, white-whiskered man, dressed in grey, with a drab slouch hat, a kindly eye and a courteous demeanor to every one, as he galloped slowly down the long lines of veterans, thirty thousand lusty voices made the very welkin ring with welcome for the chief. In expressing my views, formed as well from the history of the past as the lights of the present, I turn to the jottings in my journal made on the commencement of 1863, and note the surroundings at that time, as they appeared to me, of the people struggling for nationality, whose chosen and most popular leader he was. And here is what I wrote: "We are ready and willing to meet the enemy in Virginia, where their army is a defeated—ours a victorious—one. They have accomplished nothing at Charleston or in North. Carolina; have not even attacked Mobile; have utterly failed before Vicksburg, and Bragg is holding them in check at Tullahoma. The Northwest is becoming dissatisfied; the Greeley faction are talking of peace; France is muttering threats of intervention, and all these things tend to demoralize their armies and embarrass their movements. For the last time I will indulge in another prophecy. Ere the end of 1863, the sulphurous canopy of civil war and internecine strife, which now hangs over our land, will have rolled away, and the mild-eyed spirit of peace will move her gentle wand over the bright homesteads, the pleasant fields and sunny savannahs of our Southern land. It may not be soon, but until it does we will continue our every exertion, and fight and suffer and do and dare,' And swear by God's burning eye As I look over this now I smile "a smile that is childlike and bland," when I remember that only ten years later I was shouting myself hoarse for Greeley and Brown, and keeping the very best company in doing so. Such we were, and such our hopes and aspirations as President Davis, with modest dignity, returned the salutations of his soldiery on that December morning. Since that time, ridicule and abuse and slander have been leveled at him; he has been imprisoned and disfranchised, branded as a traitor, and still the memory of his honorable deeds and great services lie treasured in the Southern heart. The war is long since over, all its issues have been forever settled by the dread arbitrament of arms, and I only desire to point out where rested the deserved popularity of Mr. Davis with the Southern people, and not even refer to the atrocious stories told in the North just after the war. There was something so unchristian and cowardly in their treatment of him that it were better forever buried beneath the Lethean river. Like all representative men, he had enough enemies to misrepresent him at home. The open warfare of the turbulent Toombs; the mock heroic gravity of the saintly Stephens, who can since find no ground of compromise to stand upon, and is now valiantly waging his war, not having commenced until everybody else had finished; the fierce and fiery Foote who could not forget the two young men who, years before, were honored by Mississippi, and that he was infinitely the lesser of the two, and his bottled wrath and envy made itself heard by discordant croakings in the Confederate Congress, like Poe's "Bird of evil omen, ever sitting, never flitting, on the bust of Pallas, just above my chamber door," during the progress of the war, and until near its close. But at the time that the stately fabric was fast falling to pieces he changed his croakings into the shrill notes of defeat, and endeavored to escape to the enemy, when he was captured by an officious. provost marshal on the Rappahannock, to the infinite annoyance of the President and his Cabinet. Perhaps the most malignant and mendacious attack ever made on him was by Jordan, whose ill-timed and truculent articles appeared in the Harpers' publications, from whence had come the most sanguinary shouts for vae victis, and at a time when Davis was confined in a felon's dungeon, halting between life and death, and recalling to the horrified world the scenes of the Medieval Bastile. With a firmness of execution, indicating an honesty of purpose, he discharged his high duties, and the people appreciated him for it. Foote charges favoritism and obstinacy on him with more truth than most assertions he makes. Several instances of that were shown during the war. In the first days thereof when it was our proud boast that one Southerner could whip five Yankees, and after the illomened victory at Manassas had inspired us with over-confidence and nerved our adversaries to fresh effort, Albert Sidney Johnson was assailed with the most outrageous and abusive clamor by the Southern press because he fell back before the advancing foe, and the demand that he be removed was ten thousand times repeated. This the President obstinately refused to do; and when the news of Shiloh was flashed throughout the land, it was met with a wail of woe from an entire people for the loss of a great general and a good man. When Gen. Lee commenced his career as a Confederate officer, by retreating across Virginia before Rosecranz, the same tumultuous clamor for his being removed or superseded was raised by the valorous stay-at-homes, and again. the obstinacy of Mr. Davis saved the country a general that all the world now delights to honor. The patient spirit of the indomitable Stonewall Jackson, ere he was known to fame, gave away before the rough assaults of chimney-corner generals, and he demanded peremptorily that he might resign and be saved those humiliations; and once more the peculiar obstinacy and favoritism of the President saved the country its greatest military genius. Out of sixty thousand appointees how few mistakes did he commit! Faults he had, this President, but none to obscure his virtues; mistakes he did make, no doubt; but, take him all in all, a most noble and gallant fight did he and his people wage againt fearful odds, and failed to make the "Lost Cause a success only because of circumstances which no mortal hand could have controlled. Lincoln, disguised in his tartan plaid, smuggled himself into the capital of his country. Davis made his progress from his home to Montgomery amidst one prolonged ovation. He was not the man the public mind pointed to as the leader in a contest he had done so little to inaugurate, but he was cheerfully accepted because of his unquestioned ability and previous services. Lincoln, in the hour of success, died by the hand of the assassin, and is enrolled among the white-robed army of martyrs. Davis was conquered by overwhelming power, and lives to be appreciated hereafter. The posterity to which Swift appealed will do him justice. In the long list of heroes that march down. the dim corridors of time, he will occupy a prominent position, and his name will grace the company of such as Hannibal and Zenobia, of Mithridates and Marco Bozarris, of Kosciusko and Mazzini. MR CHAPTER XXI. SHADRACH, MESHACH AND ABEDNEGO. "Yes, it's true, I am indeed "I never gets a cold in the 'ed, "And my knowledge is not far behind -[Hood. RS. Andrew Jackson Martin was one of the most charming and accomplished ladies I ever had the good fortune to meet. She lived near Grenada, Mississippi, and her kind heart was full of sympathy for the gallant "boys in gray." On the merry Christmas of '62 she gave our officers a magnificent dinner, to which we did more than ample justice. She entertained with all the fascinating grace of Josephine or Madame Roland. She had been a reigning belle of St. Louis and New Orleans, and was still in the happiest prime of her beauty and life. Her father was a Warfield, through whom she was connected by close ties of kinship to Kentucky's sweetest poetess and to Virginia's greatest authoress. In her company, the wrinkled front of stern and wintery war was smoothed or forgotten, and, as far as good manners would allow, our officers availed themselves of her delicately tendered and generous hospitality. On one occasion the brigade commander suggested that my absence had been a little too long. I told him the river was so high that I could not cross it to reach camp without swimming my horse. It was deemed a good excuse, although I did not tell him that I had to swim my horse half a mile to get over there. One day a basket was brought me, and, on inspecting its contents, I found it to contain a juvenile pig, nicely roasted and stuffed, a perfect triumph of the culinary art, and a most splendid feast for a mess of halfstarved soldiers. It was a present from our fair Christmas hostess. The bearer of it was the scion of some African prince, as black as the tadpoles of his native jungles, but |