tion for the future.

Everywhere in the South was earnest endeavor and heartfelt enthusiasm
for the cause; but I saw it nowhere directed into such practical and
productive channels, thus early, as in South Carolina. Charleston,
Pensacola and Virginia had drained her of younger and more active men;
but the older ones and her vast resources of slave labor made up for
the loss, and neither time nor energy seemed to be misapplied.

After a rest, I found a freight train with a philanthropic conductor,
and started for Kingsville. _Vae Victis!_

I reached that station--what a misnomer!--in a driving mist and a very
bad humor. Neither was a fine preparation for the news that a train had
smashed seventeen miles above, tearing up the track and effectually
blocking the road. The down train, with which we were to connect, could
not come through; not a car was visible; no one knew when we could get
off, and the engine we had left was just disappearing around a
curve--Charlestonward.

One hopeful individual ventured a mild suggestion that we should have
to stay all night. He weighed a hundred and eighty pounds, at
least--not a fraction less--so I remained passive; but ten pounds
subtracted from his avoirdupois would have brought him a black eye.
Stay all night! The idea was an ague!

Kingsville was a splendid aggregation of one house and a long platform.
The town--_i.e._, the house--had, even in palmy days, been remarkable
on the road for great dirt, wretched breakfasts and worse whisky. You
entered at one door, grabbed a biscuit and a piece of bacon and rushed
out at the other; or you got an awful decoction of brown sugar and
turpentine in a green tumbler. Constant travel and crowds of passing
soldiers had not improved it in any particular. The very looks of the
place were repugnant enough in the daytime, but

"Bold was he who hither came
At midnight--man or boy!"

I felt that a night in the rain under the pines, with my bag for a
pillow, would be endurable; but no mortal with a white skin could dare
those bloated and odorous feather-beds, where other things--in the
shape of mordants, vivacious, active and gigantic--besides

"Wicked dreams abuse the curtained sleeper."

To mend matters, Gartrell's regiment of Georgians, eight hundred and
fifty _strong_, and three other companies of Georgians from Pensacola,
had been left here to meet a way-train, which failing, they bivouacked
by the roadside. In all there wer