e capitals with which the
journalists headed their daily bits of romance from Vicksburg and
elsewhere. It was with great difficulty that I scrawled detached
sentences at long intervals--a difficulty that, I fear, some unhappy
compositor, doomed to decipher the foregoing pages, will thoroughly
appreciate, though he may decline to sympathize with.

I had one passage of arms with the Superintendent during that week. I
have an idea that I spoke somewhat freely with regard to the
Administration that he had the honor to serve, pressing him for a
justification of its conduct in my own especial case.

The official listened quite coolly and calmly, with a twinkle of
amusement in his shrewd cynical eyes, and answered:

"Well, we've had a good bit of trouble with England and English this
year; and I reckon they think they've got a pretty fair-sized fish now,
and mean to keep him, whether or no."

"That's Republican justice, all over," I said; "to make the one that you
can catch, pay for the dozen that you can't, or that you are afraid to
grapple with."

"I don't know about justice," was the reply; "but it's d----d good
policy."

And so we parted--not a whit worse friends than before.

Delicta, majorum, immeritus lues,

if memory had not failed me, I might have quoted that line often and
appropriately enough. But every agent in the "robbery"--from the
vainglorious Virginian, my chief captor, down to the smooth Secretary,
whose velvet gripe was so loth to unclose--seemed provokingly bent on
exaggerating the importance of their prize. Perhaps the very interest
felt in my release, and the exertions unsparingly used--especially in
Baltimore--to secure it, strengthened the false impressions or pretenses
of the Federal powers. I write in the firm assurance that no Southern
friend will deem these words ungracious or ungrateful.

There is no stone, above or below ground, white enough to mark,
worthily, in my calender, the fifth day of last June. I hereby abjure,
for evermore, any superstitious prejudice against the ill luck of
Fridays. Late in the afternoon, I was pacing to and fro in the narrow
exercise-ground, speculating idly as to the delay of my dinner, which
was overdue--not that I felt any interest in the subject, but it was a
sort of break, and fresh starting-point in the monotony of hours--when I
was summoned once more into official presence. They took me to the room
on the ground-floor, where I had waited on the fi