STAGE-COACH CONVERSATION.

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ginia carried it on. If Virginia had thrown the weight of her very great power in the Union against secession, resort to. arms would never have been necessary. She held a position which she has forfeited forever, because she was not true to it. By seceding she lost wealth, influence, slavery, and the blood of her bravest sons; and what has she gained? I wonder, sir, how your State pride can hold out so well."

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"Virginia," he replied, with another gleam, his eyes doing the fine frenzy again, “ Virginia made the gallantest fight that ever was; and I am prouder of her to-day than I ever was in my life!"

"But you are glad she is back in the Union again?"

"To tell the truth, I am. I think more of the Union, too, than I ever did before. It was a square, stand-up fight; we got beaten, and I suppose it is all for the best. The very hottest Secessionists are now the first to come back and offer support to the government." He tapped a little tin trunk he carried. "I have fifty pardons here, which I am carrying from Washington to Richmond, for men who, a year ago, you would have said would drown themselves sooner than take the oath of allegiance to the United States. It was a rich sight to see these very men crowding to take the oath. It was a bitter pill to some, and they made wry faces at it; but the rest were glad enough to get back into the old Union. It was like going home."

"What astonishes me," said I, "after all the Southern people's violent talk about the last ditch, about carrying on an endless guerrilla warfare after their armies were broken up, and fighting in swamps and mountains till the last man was exterminated, what astonishes me is, that they take so sensible a view of their situation, and accept it so frankly; and that you, a Rebel, and I, a Yankee, are sitting on this stage talking over the bloody business so good-naturedly!"

Well, it is astonishing, when you think of it! Southern men and Northern men ride together in the trains, and stop at the same hotels, as if we were all one people, -as indeed we are: one nation now," he added, 66 as we never were before, and never could have been without the war."

I got down at the hotel, washed and brushed away the dust of travel, and went out to the dining-room. There the first thing that met my eye was a pair of large wooden fans, covered with damask cloth which afforded an ample flap to each, suspended over the table, and set in motion by means of a rope dropped from a pulley by the door. At the end of the rope was a shining negro-boy about ten years old, pulling as if it were the rope of a fire-bell, and the whole town were in flames. The fans swayed to and fro, a fine breeze blew all up and down the table, and not a fly was to be seen. I noticed before long, however, that the little darkey's industry was of an intermittent sort; for at times he would cease pulling altogether, until the landlady passed that way, when he would seem to hear the cries of fire again, and once more fall to ringing his silent alarm-bell in the most violent manner.

The landlady was the manager of the house; and I naturally took her to be a widow until her husband was pointed out to me, a mere tavern lounger, of no account any way. It is quite common to find Virginia hotels kept in this manner. The wife does the work; the husband takes his ease in his inn. The business goes in her name; he is the sleeping partner.

After dinner I went out to view the town. As I stood looking at the empty walls of the gutted court-house, a sturdy old man approached. He stopped to answer my questions, and pointing at the havoc made by shells, exclaimed,

"You see the result of the vanity of Virginia!" "Are you a Virginian!"

"I am; but that is no reason why I should be blind to the faults of my State. It was the vanity of Virginia, and nothing else, that caused all our trouble."

(Here was another name for "State pride.")

"You were not very much in favor of secession, I take it?" "In favor of it!" he exclaimed, kindling. "Did n't they have me in jail here nine weeks because I would not vote for it? If I had n't been an old man, they would have hung me. Ah, I told them how it would be, from the first; but they would n't believe me. Now they see! Look at this

ruined city! Look at the farms and plantations laid waste! Look at the complete paralysis of business; the rich reduced to poverty; the men and boys with one arm, one leg, or one hand; the tens of thousands of graves; the broken families; -it is all the result of vanity! vanity!”

He showed me the road to the Heights, and we parted on the corner.

CHAPTER XIII.

THE FIELD OF FREDERICKSBURG.

FREDERICKSBURG stands upon a ridge on the right bank of the river. Behind the town is a plain, with a still more elevated ridge beyond. From the summit of the last you obtain an excellent view of the battle-field; the plain below the town where Hooker fought; the heights on the opposite side of the river manned by our batteries; the fields on the left; and the plain between the ridge and the town, where the frightfullest slaughter was.

Along by the foot of the crest, just where it slopes off to the plain, runs a road with a wall of heavy quarried stones on each side. In this road the Rebels lay concealed when the first attempt was made to storm the Heights. The wall on the lower side, towards the town, is the "stone wall" of history. It was a perfect breastwork, of great strength, and in the very best position that could have been chosen. The earth from the fields is more or less banked up against it; and this, together with the weeds and bushes which grew there, served to conceal it from our men. The sudden cruel volley of flame and lead which poured over it into their very faces, scarce a dozen paces distant, as they charged, was the first intimation they received of any enemy below the crest. No troops could stand that near and deadly fire. They broke, and leaving the ground strown with the fallen, retreated to the "ravine," a deep ditch with a little stream flowing through it, in the midst of the plain.

"Just when they turned to run, that was the worst time for them!" said a young Rebel I met on the Heights. "Then our men had nothing to fear; but they just rose right up and

STORMING OF FREDERICKSBURG

let 'em have it!

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Every charge your troops made afterwards, it was the same. The infantry in the road, and the artillery on these Heights, just mowed them down in swaths! You never saw anything look as that plain did after the battle. Saturday morning, before the fight, it was brown; Sunday it was all blue; Monday it was white, and Tuesday it was red."

I asked him to explain this seeming riddle.

66 "Don't you see? Before the fight there was just the field. Next it was covered all over with your fellows in blue clothes. Saturday night the blue clothes were stripped off, and only their white under-clothes left. Monday night these were stripped off, and Tuesday they lay all in their naked skins." "Who stripped the dead in that way?"

"It was mostly done by the North Carolinians. They are the triflin'est set of men!"

"What do you mean by triflin'est ?

"They ha'n't got no sense. They'll stoop to anything. They're more like savages than civilized men.

They say

'we 'uns' and you 'uns,' and all such outlandish phrases. They 've got a great long tone to their voice, like something wild."

"Were you in the battle?"

"Yes, I was in all of Saturday's fight. My regiment was stationed on the hill down on the right there. We could see everything. Your men piled up their dead for breast works. It was an awful sight when the shells struck them, and exploded! The air, for a minute, would be just full of legs and arms and pieces of trunks. Down by the road there we dug out a wagon-load of muskets. They had been piled up by your fellows, and dirt thrown over them, for a breastwork. But the worst sight I saw was three days afterwards. I didn't mind the heaps of dead, nor nothing. But just a starving dog sitting by a corpse, which he would n't let anybody come near, and which he never left night nor day; - by George, that just made me cry! We finally had to shoot the dog to get at the man to bury him."