ad all
these under my hand. Could it be,--"Julia, what did we do with that
stuff of Sarah's that she marked _secret service_?"

As I live, we had sent the girls' old hoops to the President in his
flight.

And when the next day we read how he used them, and how Pritchard
arrested him, we thought if he had only had the right parcel he would
have found the way to Florida.

That is really the end of this memoir. But I should not have written it,
but for something that happened just now on the piazza. You must know,
some of us wrecks are up here at the Berkeley baths. My uncle has a
place near here. Here came to-day John Sisson, whom I have not seen
since Memminger ran and took the clerks with him. Here we had before,
both the Richards brothers, the great paper men, you know, who started
the Edgerly Works in Prince George's County, just after the war began.
After dinner, Sisson and they met on the piazza. Queerly enough, they
had never seen each other before, though they had used reams of
Richards' paper in correspondence with each other, and the treasury had
used tons of it in the printing of bonds and bank-bills. Of course we
all fell to talking of old times,--old they seem now, though it is not a
year ago. "Richards," said Sisson at last, "what became of that last
order of ours for water-lined, pure linen government calendered paper of
_surete_? We never got it, and I never knew why."

"Did you think Kilpatrick got it?" said Richards, rather gruffly.

"None of your chaff, Richards. Just tell where the paper went, for in
the loss of that lot of paper, as it proved, the bottom dropped out of
the Treasury tub. On that paper was to have been printed our new issue
of ten per cent., convertible, you know, and secured on that up-country
cotton, which Kirby Smith had above the Big Raft. I had the printers
ready for near a month waiting for that paper. The plates were really
very handsome. I'll show you a proof when we go up stairs. Wholly new
they were, made by some Frenchman we got, who had worked for the Bank of
France. I was so anxious to have the thing well done, that I waited
three weeks for that paper, and, by Jove, I waited just too long. We
never got one of the bonds off, and that was why we had no money in
March."

Richards threw his cigar away. I will not say he swore between his
teeth, but he twirled his chair round, brought it down on all fours,
both his elbows on his knees and his chin in both hands.

"Mr. S