University of Virginia Library

CHAPTER LIII.

On the 17th August I returned to Baltimore on my way to
Drohoregan Manor, the seat of Colonel Carroll, in Maryland,
where I had been invited to spend a few days by his son-in-law,
an English gentleman of my acquaintance. Leaving
Baltimore at 5.40, P. M., in company with Mr. Tucker Carroll,
I proceeded by train to Ellicott's Mills, a station fourteen
miles on the Ohio and Baltimore Railroad, from which our
host's residence is distant more than an hour's drive. The
country through which the line passes is picturesque and undulating,
with hills and valleys and brawling streams, spreading
in woodland and glade, ravine, and high uplands on either
side, haunted by cotton factories, poisoning air and water;
but it has been a formidable district for the engineers to get
through, and the line abounds in those triumphs of engineering
which are generally the ruin of shareholders.

All these lines are now in the hands of the military. At
the Washington terminus there is a guard placed to see
that no unauthorized person or unwilling volunteer is going
north; the line is watched by patrols and sentries; troops are
encamped along its course. The factory chimneys are smokeless;
half the pleasant villas which cover the hills or dot the
openings in the forest have a deserted look and closed windows.
And so these great works, the Carrollton Viaduct, the Thomas
Viaduct, and the high embankments and great cuttings in
the ravine by the riverside, over which the line passes, have
almost a depressing effect, as if the people for whose use they
were intended had all become extinct. At Ellicott's Mills,
which is a considerable manufacturing town, more soldiers and

Union flags. The people are Unionists, but the neighboring
gentry and country people are Seceshers.

This is the case wherever there is a manufacturing population
in Maryland, because the workmen are generally foreigners,
or have come from the Northern States, and feel little
sympathy with States Rights' doctrines, and the tendencies of
the landed gentry to a conservative action on the slave question.
There was no good-will in the eyes of the mechanicals
as they stared at our vehicle; for the political bias of Colonel
Carroll was well known, as well as the general sentiments of
his family. It was dark when we reached the manor, which
is approached by an avenue of fine trees. The house is old-fashioned,
and has received additions from time to time. But
for the black faces of the domestics, one might easily fancy
he was in some old country house in Ireland. The family
have adhered to their ancient faith. The founder of the Carrolls
in Maryland came over with the Catholic colonists led
by Lord Baltimore, or by his brother, Leonard Calvert; and
the Colonel possesses some interesting deeds of grant and conveyance
of the vast estates, which have been diminished by
large sales year after year, but still spread over a considerable
part of several counties in the State.

Colonel Carroll is an immediate descendant of one of the
leaders in the Revolution of 1776; and he pointed out to me
the room in which Carroll, of Carrollton, and George Washington,
were wont to meet when they were concocting their
splendid treason. One of his connections married the late
Marquis Wellesley; and the Colonel takes pleasure in setting
forth how the daughter of the Irish recusant, who fled from
his native country all but an outlaw, sat on the throne of the
Queen of Ireland, or, in other words, held court in Dublin
Castle as wife of the Viceroy. Drohoregan is supposed to
mean "Hall of the Kings," and is called after an old place
belonging, some time or other, to the family, the early history
of which, as set forth in the Celtic authorities and Irish antiquarian
works, possesses great attractions for the kindly,
genial old man,—kindly and genial to all but the Abolitionists
and Black Republicans; nor is he indifferent to the reputation
of the State in the Revolutionary War, where the "Maryland
line" seems to have differed from many of the contingents
of the other States, in not running away so often at
critical moments in the serious actions. Colonel Carroll has
sound arguments to prove the sovereign independence and

right of every State in the Union, derived from family teaching
and the lessons of those who founded the Constitution itself.

On the day after my arrival the rain fell in torrents. The
weather is as uncertain as that of our own isle. The torrid
heats at Washington, the other day, were succeeded by bitter
cold days; now there is a dense mist, chilly and cheerless,
seeming as a sort of strainer for the even down-pour that
falls through it continuously. The family after breakfast
slipped round to the little chapel, which forms the extremity
of one wing of the house. The colored people on the estate
were already trooping across the lawn and up the avenue
from the slave quarters, decently dressed for the most part,
having due allowance for the extraordinary choice of colors
in their gowns, bonnets, and ribbons, and for the unhappy imitations,
on the part of the men, of the attire of their masters.
They walked demurely and quietly past the house;
and presently the priest, dressed like a French curé, trotted
up, and service began. The negro houses were of a much
better and more substantial character than those one sees in
the South, though not remarkable for cleanliness and good
order. Truth to say, they were palaces compared to the huts
of Irish laborers, such as might be found, perhaps, on the
estates of the colonel's kinsmen at home. The negroes are
far more independent than they are in the South. They are
less civil, less obliging, and, although they do come cringing
to shake hands as the field hands on a Louisianian plantation,
less servile. They inhabit a small village of brick and
wood houses, across the road at the end of the avenue, and in
sight of the house. The usual swarms of little children,
poultry, pigs, enlivened by goats, embarrassed the steps of
the visitor; and the old people, or those who were not finely
dressed enough for mass, peered out at the strangers from the
glassless windows.

When chapel was over, the boys and girls came up for
catechism, and passed in review before the ladies of the house,
with whom they were on very good terms. The priest joined
us in the veranda when his labors were over, and talked with
intelligence of the terrible war which has burst over the land.
He has just returned from a tour in the Northern States; and
it is his 'belief the native Americans there will not enlist, but
that they will get foreigners to fight their battles. He admitted
that slavery was in itself an evil, nay, more, that it
was not profitable in Maryland. But what are the landed

proprietors to do? The slaves have been bequeathed to them
as property by their fathers, with certain obligations to be respected,
and duties to be fulfilled. It is impossible to free
them, because, at the moment of emancipation, nothing short
of the confiscation of all the labor and property of the whites
would be required to maintain the negroes, who would certainly
refuse to work, unless they had their masters' land as
their own. Where is white labor to be found? Its introduction
must be the work of years; and meantime many thousands
of slaves, who have a right to protection, would canker
the land.

In Maryland they do not breed slaves for the purpose of
selling them as they do in Virginia, and yet Colonel Carroll
and other gentlemen who regarded the slaves they inherited
almost as members of their families, have been stigmatized
by Abolition orators as slave-breeders and slave-dealers. It
was these insults which stung the gentlemen of Maryland and
of the other Slave States to the quick, and made them resolve
never to yield to the domination of a party which had never
ceased to wage war against their institutions and their reputation
and honor.

A little knot of friends and relations joined Colonel Carroll
at dinner. There are few families in this part of Maryland
which have not representatives in the other army across the
Potomac; and if Beauregard could but make his appearance,
the women alone would give him welcome such as no conqueror
ever received in liberated city.

Next day the rain fell incessantly. The mail was brought
in by a little negro boy on horseback, and I was warned by
my letters that an immediate advance of McClellan's troops
was probable. This is an old story. "Battle expected tomorrow"
has been a heading in the papers for the last fortnight.
In the afternoon I was driven over a part of the
estate in a close carriage, through the windows of which, however,
I caught glimpses of a beautiful country, wooded gloriously,
and soft, sylvan, and well-cultivated as the best parts of
Hampshire and Gloucestershire, the rolling lands of which
latter county, indeed, it much resembled in its large fields,
heavy with crops of tobacco and corn. The weather was too
unfavorable to admit of a close inspection of the fields; but I
visited one or two tobacco houses, where the fragrant Maryland
was lying in masses on the ground, or hanging from the
rafters, or filled the heavy hogsheads with compressed smoke.

Next day I took the train, at Ellicott's Mills, and went to
Harper's Ferry. There is no one spot, in the history of this
extraordinary war, which can be well more conspicuous.
Had it nothing more to recommend it than the scenery, it
might well command a visit from the tourist; but as the scene
of old John Brown's raid upon the Federal arsenal, of that
first passage of arms betweeen the Abolitionists and the Slave
Conservatives, which has developed this great contest; above
all, as the spot where important military demonstrations have
been made on both sides, and will necessarily occur hereafter,
this place, which probably derives its name from some
wretched old boatman, will be renowned forever in the annals
of the Civil War of 1861. The Patapsco, by the bank of
which the rail is carried for some" miles, has all the character
of a mountain torrent, rushing through gorges or carving out
its way at the base of granite hills, or boldly cutting a path for
itself through the softer slate. Bridges, viaducts, remarkable
archways, and great spans of timber trestle-work leaping
from hill to hill, enable the rail to creep onwards and upwards
by the mountain side to the Potomac at Point of Rocks,
whence it winds its way over undulating ground, by stations
with eccentric names to the river's bank once more. We
were carried on to the station next to Harper's Ferry on a
ledge of the precipitous mountain range which almost overhangs
the stream. But few civilians were in the train. The
greater number of passengers consisted of soldiers and sutlers,
proceeding to their encampments along the river. A strict
watch was kept over the passengers, whose passes were examined
by officers at the various stations. At one place an
officer who really looked like a soldier entered the train, and
on seeing my pass told me in broken English that he had
served in the Crimea, and was acquainted with me and many
of my friends. The gentleman who accompanied me observed,
'I do not know whether he was in the Crimea or not, but I do
know that till very lately your friend the Major was a dancing-master
in New York." A person of a very different type
made his offers of service, Colonel Gordon of the 2d Massachusetts
Regiment, who caused the train to run on as far as
Harper's Ferry, in order to give me a sight of the place,
although in consequence of the evil habit of firing on the
carriages in which the Confederates across the river have
been indulging, the locomotive generally halts at some distance
below the bend of the river.

Harper's Ferry lies in a gorge formed by a rush of the
Potomac through the mountain ridges, which it cuts at right
angles to its course at its junction with the river Shenandoah.
So trenchant and abrupt is the division that little land is on
the divided ridge to build upon. The precipitous hills on both
sides are covered with forest, which has been cleared in
patches here and there on the Maryland shore, to permit of
the erection of batteries. On the Virginian side there lies a
mass of blackened and ruined buildings, from which a street
lined with good houses stretches up the hill. Just above the
junction of the Shenandoah with the Potomae, an elevated
bridge or viaduct 300 yards long leaps from hill-side to hillside.
The arches had been broken—the rails which ran
along the top torn up, and there is now a deep gulf fixed between
the shores of Maryland and Virginia. The rail to
Winchester from this point has been destroyed, and the line
along the Potomac has also been ruined.

But for the batteries which cover the shoal water at the
junction of the two rivers below the bridge, there would be no
difficulty in crossing to the Maryland shore, and from that side
the whole of the ground around Harper's Ferry is completely
commanded. The gorge is almost as deep as the pass of
Killiecranckie, which it resembles in most respects except in
breadth and the size of the river between, and if ever a railroad
finds its way to Blair Athol, the passengers will find
something to look at very like the scenery on the route to
Harper's Ferry. The vigilance required to guard the pass
of the river above and below this point is incessant, but the
Federals possess the advantage on their side of a deep canal
parallel to the railway and running above the level of the
river, which would be a more formidable obstacle than the
Potomac to infantry or guns. There is reason to believe that
the Secessionists in Maryland cross backwards and forwards
whenever they please, and the Virginians coming down at
their leisure to the opposite shore, inflict serious annoyance on
the Federal troops by constant rifle practice.

Looking up and down the river the scenery is picturesque,
though it is by no means entitled to the extraordinary praises
which American tourists lavish upon it. Probably old John
Brown cared little for the wild magic of streamlet or rill, or
for the blended charm of vale and woodland. When he made
his attack on the arsenal now in ruins, he probably thought a
valley was as high as a hill, and that there was no necessity

for water running downwards—assuredly he saw as little of
the actual heights and depths around him when he ran across
the Potomac to revolutionize Virginia. He has left behind
him millions either as clear-sighted or as blind as himself. In
New England parlors a statuette of John Brown may be found
as a pendant to the likeness of our Saviour. In Virginia his
name is the synonyme of all that is base, bloody, and cruel.

Harper's Ferry at present, for all practical purposes, may
be considered as Confederate property. The few Union inhabitants
remain in their houses, but many of the Government
workmen and most of the inhabitants have gone off
South. For strategical purposes its possession would be most
important to a force desiring to operate on Maryland from
Virginia. The Blue Ridge range running up to the Shenandoah
divides the country so as to permit a force debouching
from Harper's Ferry to advance down the valley of the
Shenandoah on the right, or to move to the left between the
Blue Ridge and the Katoctin mountains towards the Manassas
Railway at its discretion. After a false alarm that some
Secesh cavalry were coming down to renew the skirmishing
of the day before, I returned, and travelling to Relay House
just saved the train to Washington, where I arrived after
sunset. A large number of Federal troops are employed
along these lines, which they occupy as if they were in a
hostile country. An imperfectly formed regiment broken up
into these detachments and placed in isolated posts, under ignorant
officers, may be regarded as almost worthless for military
operations. Hence the constant night alarms—the
mistakes—the skirmishes and instances of misbehavior which
arise along these extended lines.

On the journey from Harper's Ferry, the concentration of
masses of troops along the road, and the march of heavy artillery
trains, caused me to think a renewal of the offensive
movement against Richmond was immediate, but at Washington
I heard that all McClellan wanted or hoped for at present,
was to make Maryland safe and to gain time for the formation
of his army. The Confederates appear to be moving towards
their left, and McClellan is very uneasy lest they should make
a vigorous attack before he is prepared to receive them.

In the evening the New York papers came in with the extracts
from the London papers containing my account of the
battle of Bull Run. Utterly forgetting their own versions
of the engagement, the New York editors now find it convenient

to divert attention from the bitter truth that was in them,
to the letter of the foreign newspaper correspondent, who, because
he is a British subject, will prove not only useful as a
conductor to carry off the popular wrath from the American
journalists themselves, but as a means by induction of charging
the vials afresh against the British people, inasmuch as
they have not condoled with the North on the defeat of armies
which they were assured would, if successful, he immediately
led to effect the disruption of the British empire. At the
outset I had foreseen this would be the case, and deliberately
accepted the issue; but when I found the Northern journal
far exceeding in severity anything I could have said, and indulging
in general invective against whole classes of American
soldiery, officers, and statesmen, I was foolish enough to expect
a little justice, not to say a word of the smallest generosity.

August 21st.—The echoes of Bull Bun are coming back
with a vengeance. This day month the miserable fragments
of a beaten, washed out, demoralized army, were flooding in
disorder and dismay the streets of the capital from which they
had issued forth to repel the tide of invasion. This day month
and all the editors and journalists in the States, weeping, wailing,
and gnashing their teeth, infused extra gall into their ink,
and poured out invective, abuse, and obloquy on their defeated
general and their broken hosts. The President and his Ministers,
stunned by the tremendous calamity, sat listening in fear
and trembling for the sound of the enemy's cannon. The
veteran soldier, on whom the boasted hopes of the nation
rested, heart-sick and beaten down, had neither counsel to give
nor action to offer. At any moment the Confederate columns
might be expected in Pennsylvania Avenue to receive the
welcome of their friends and the submission of their helpless
and disheartened enemies.

All this is forgotten—and much more, which need not
now be repeated. Saved from a great peril, even the bitterness
of death, they forget the danger that has passed, deny
that they uttered cries of distress and appeals for help, and
swagger in all the insolence of recovered strength. Not only
that, but they turn and rend those whose writing has been
dug up after thirty days, and comes back as a rebuke to their
pride.

Conscious that they have insulted and irritated their own
army, that they have earned the bitter hostility of men in

power, and have for once inflicted a wound on the vanity to
which they have given such offensive dimensions, if not life
itself, they now seek to run a drag scent between the public
nose and their own unpopularity, and to create such an
amount of indignation and to cast so much odium upon one
who has had greater facilities to know, and is more willing to
tell the truth, than any of their organs, that he will be unable
henceforth to perform his duties in a country where unpopularity
means simply a political and moral atrophy or death.
In the telegraphic summary some days ago a few phrases
were picked out of my letters, which were but very faint
paraphrases of some of the sentences which might be culled
from Northern newspapers, but the storm has been gathering
ever since, and I am no doubt to experience the truth of De
Tocqueville's remark, "that a stranger who injures American
vanity, no matter how justly, may make up his mind to be a
martyr."

August 22d.—

The North have recovered their wind, and their pipers are
blowing with might and main. The time given them to
breathe after Bull Run has certainly been accompanied with
a greater development of lung and power of blowing than
could have been expected. The volunteer army which dispersed
and returned home to receive the Io Pæans of the
North, has been replaced by better and more numerous levies,
which have the strong finger and thumb of General McClellan
on their windpipe, and find it is not quite so easy as it was
to do as they pleased. The North, besides, has received supplies
of money, and is using its great resources, by land and
sea, to some purpose, and as they wax fat they kick.

A general officer said to me, "Of course you will never
remain, when once all the press are down upon you. I would
not take a million dollars and be in your place." "But is
what I've written untrue?" "God bless you! do you know
in this country if you can get enough of people to start a lie
about any man, he would be ruined, if the Evangelists came
forward to swear the story was false. There are thousands
of people who this moment believe that McDowell, who never
tasted anything stronger than a water-melon in all his life,

was helplessly drunk at Bull Run. Mind what I say; they'll
run you into a mud-hole as sure as you live." I was not
much impressed with the danger of my position further than
that I knew there would be a certain amount of risk from
the rowdyism and vanity of what even the Americans admit
to be the lower orders, for which I had been prepared from
the moment I had despatched my letter; but I confess I was
not by any means disposed to think that the leaders of public
opinion would seek the small gratification of revenge, and the
petty popularity of pandering to the passions of the mob, by
creating a popular cry against me. I am not aware that any
foreigner ever visited the United States who was injudicious
enough to write one single word derogatory to their claims to
be the first of created beings, who was not assailed with the
most viperous malignity and rancor. The man who says he
has detected a single spot on the face of their sun should prepare
his winding sheet.

The "New York Times," I find, states "that the terrible
epistle has been read with quite as much avidity as an average
President's Message. We scarcely exaggerate the fact
when we say, the first and foremost thought on the minds of
a very large portion of our people after the repulse at Bull
Run was, what will Russell say?" and then they repeat some
of the absurd sayings attributed to me, who declared openly
from the very first that I had not seen the battle at all, to the
effect "that I had never seen such fighting in all my life, and
that nothing at Alma or Inkerman was equal to it." An analysis
of the letter follows, in which it is admitted that "with
perfect candor I purported to give an account of what I saw,
and not of the action which I did not see," and the writer,
who is, if I mistake not, the Hon. Mr. Raymond, of the "New
York Times," like myself a witness of the facts I describe,
quotes a passage in which I say, "There was no flight of
troops, no retreat of an army, no reason for all this precipitation,"
and then declares "that my letter gives a very spirited
and perfectly just description of the panic which impelled and
accompanied the troops from Centreville to Washington. He
does not, for he cannot, in the least exaggerate its horrible
disorder, or the disgraceful behavior of the incompetent officers
by whom it was aided, instead of being checked. He
saw nothing whatever of the fighting, and therefore says nothing
whatever of its quality. He gives a clear, fair, perfectly
just and accurate, as it is a spirited and graphic account of

the extraordinary scenes which passed under his observation.
Discreditable as those scenes were to our army, we have
nothing in connection with them whereof to accuse the reporter;
he has done justice alike to himself, his subject, and
the country."

Ne nobis blandiar, I may add, that at least I desired to do
so, and I can prove from Northern papers that if their accounts
were true, I certainly much "extenuated and nought
set down in malice"—nevertheless, Philip drunk is very
different from Philip sober, frightened, and running away,
and the man who attempts to justify his version to the inebriated
polycephalous monarch is sure to meet such treatment as
inebriated despots generally award to their censors.

August 23d.—The torrent is swollen to-day by anonymous
letters threatening me with bowie-knife and revolver, or simply
abusive, frantic with hate, and full of obscure warnings.
Some bear the Washington postmark, others came from New
York, the greater number—for I have had nine—are from
Philadelphia. Perhaps they may come from the members of
that "gallant" 4th Pennsylvania Regiment.

August 24th.—My servant came in this morning, to announce
a trifling accident—he was exercising my horse, and
at the corner of one of those charming street crossings, the
animal fell and broke its leg. A "vet" was sent for. I was
sure that such a portent had never been born in those Daunian
woods. A man about twenty-seven or twenty-eight stone
weight, middle-aged and active, with a fine professional feeling
for distressed horse-flesh; and I was right in my conjectures
that he was a Briton, though the vet had become Americanized,
and was full of enthusiasm about "our war for the Union,"
which was yielding him a fine harvest. He complained there
were a good many bad characters about Washington. The
matter is proved beyond doubt by what we see, hear, and read.
To-day there is an account in the papers of a brute shooting
a negro boy dead, because he asked him for a chew of tobacco.
Will he be hanged? Not the smallest chance of it. The
idea of hanging a white man for killing a nigger! It is more
preposterous here than it is in India, where our authorities
have actually executed whites for the murder of natives.

Before dinner I walked down to the Washington Navy Yard.
Captain Dahlgren was sorely perplexed with an intoxicated
senator, whose name it is not necessary to mention, and who
seemed to think he paid me a great compliment by expressing

his repeated desire "to have a good look at" me. "I guess
you're quite notorious now. You'll excuse me because I've
dined, now—and so you are the Mr. &c., &c., &c." The
senator informed me that he was "none of your d—d
blackfaced Republicans. He didn't care a d—about niggers
—his business was to do good to his fellow white men, to
hold our glorious Union together, and let the niggers take
care of themselves."

I was glad when a diversion was effected by the arrival of
Mr. Fox, Assistant Secretary of the Navy, and Mr. Blair, Postmaster-General,
to consult with the Captain, who is greatly looked
up to by all the members of the Cabinet—in fact he is rather
inconvenienced by the perpetual visits of the President, who
is animated by a most extraordinary curiosity about naval matters
and machinery, and is attracted by the novelty of the
whole department, so that he is continually running down "to
have a talk with Dahlgren" when he is not engaged in "a
chat with George." The senator opened such a smart fire on
the minister that the latter retired, and I mounted and rode
back to town. In the evening Major Clarence Brown, Lieutenant
Wise, a lively, pleasant, and amusing little, sailor, well-known
in the States as the author of "Los Gringos," who is
now employed in the Navy Department, and a few of the gentlemen
connected with the Foreign Legations came in, and
we had a great international reunion and discussion till a late
hour. There is a good deal of agreeable banter reserved for
myself, as to the exact form of death which I am most likely
to meet. I was seriously advised by a friend not to stir out
unarmed. The great use of a revolver is that it will prevent
the indignity of tarring and feathering, now pretty rife, by
provoking greater violence. I also received a letter from
London, advising me to apply to Lord Lyons for protection,
but that could only be extended to me within the walls of the
Legation.

August 25th.—I visited the Navy Department, which is a
small red-brick building two stories high, very plain and even
humble. The subordinate departments are conducted in rooms
below stairs. The executive are lodged in the rooms which
line both sides of the corridor above. The walls of the passage
are lined with paintings in oil and water colors, engravings and
paintings in the worst style of art. To the latter considerable
interest attaches, as they are authentic likenesses of naval
officers who gained celebrity in the wars with Great Britain—

men like Perry, McDonough, Decatur, and "Hull, who, as the
Americans boast, was" the first man who compelled a British
frigate of greater force than his own to strike her colors in fair
fight." Paul Jones was not to be seen, but a drawing is proudly
pointed to of the attack of the American fleet on Algiers as a
proof of hatred to piracy, and of the prominent part taken by
the young States in putting an end to it in Europe. In one
room are several swords, surrendered by English officers in
the single frigate engagements, and the duplicates of medals,
in gold and silver, voted by Congress to the victors. In
Lieutenant Wise's room, there are models of the projectiles,
and a series of shot and shell used in the navy, or deposited by
inventors. Among other relics was the flag of Captain Ward's
boat just brought in which was completely riddled by the bullet
marks received in the ambuscade in which that officer was
killed, with nearly all of his boat's crew, as they incautiously
approached the shore of the Potomac, to take off a small craft
placed there to decoy them by the Confederates. My business
was to pave the way for a passage on board a steamer, in case
of any naval expedition starting before the army was ready to
move, but all difficulties were at once removed by the promptitude
and courtesy of Mr. Fox, the Assistant Secretary, who
promised to give me an order for a passage whenever I required
it. The extreme civility and readiness to oblige of all American
officials, high and low, from the gate-keepers and door-porters
up to the heads of departments, cannot be too highly
praised, and it is ungenerous to accept the explanation offered
by an English officer to whom I remarked the circumstance,
that it is due to the fact that each man is liable to be turned
out at the end of four years, and therefore makes all the
friends he can.

In the afternoon I rode out with Captain Johnson, through
some charming woodland scenery on the outskirts of Washington,
by a brawling stream, in a shady little ravine, that put me
in mind of the Dargle. Our ride led us into the camps,
formed on the west of Georgetown to cover the city from the
attacks of an enemy advancing along the left bank of the
Potomac, and in support of several strong forts and earthworks
placed on the heights. One regiment consists altogether of
Frenchmen—another is of Germans—in a third I saw an
officer with a Crimean and Indian medal on his breast, and
several privates with similar decorations. Some of the regiments
were on parade, and crowds of civilians from Washington

were enjoying the novel scene, and partaking of the hospitality
of their friends. One old lady, whom I have always
seen about the camps, and who is a sort of ancient heroine of
Saragossa, had an opportunity of being useful. The 15th
Massachusetts, a fine-looking body of men, had broken up
camp, and were marching off to the sound of their own voices
chanting "Old John Brown," when one of the enormous trains
of baggage wagons attached to them was carried off by the
frightened mules which probably had belonged to Virginian
farmers, and one of the soldiers, in trying to stop it, was
dashed to the ground and severely injured. The old lady
was by his side in a moment, and out came her flask of strong
waters, bandages, and medical comforts and apparatus. "It's
well I'm here for this poor Union soldier; I'm sure I always
have something to do in these camps." On my return late,
there was a letter on my table requesting me to visit General
McClellan, but it was then too far advanced to avail myself of
the invitation, which was only delivered after I left my lodgings.