n. Hunter resolved to operate. 'Release my officers of
black troops from your condemned cells at once, and notify
me of the fact. Until so notified, your first family
prisoners in my hands'--the names then given--'will receive
precisely similar treatment. For each of my officers hung, I
will hang three of my prisoners who are slave-holders.' This
dose operated with instantaneous effect, and the next letter
received from our captured officers set forth that they were
at large on parole, and treated as well as they could wish
to be in that miserable country.

"We cannot better conclude this sketch, perhaps, than by
giving the brief but pregnant verses in which our
ex-orderly, Private Miles O'Reilly, late of the Old Tenth
Army Corps, gave his opinion on this subject. They were
first published in connection with the banquet given in New
York by Gen. T. F. Meagher and the officers of the Irish
Brigade, to the returned veterans of that organization on
the 13th of Jan. 1864, at Irving Hall. Of this song it may,
perhaps, be said, in verity and without vanity, that, as
Gen. Hunter's letter to Mr. Wickliffe had settled the negro
soldiers' controversy in its official and Congressional
form, so did the publication and immediate popular adoption
of these verses conclude all argument upon this matter in
the mind of the general public. Its common sense, with a
dash of drollery, at once won over the Irish, who had been
the bitterest opponents of the measure, to become its
friends; and from that hour to this, the attacks upon the
experiment of our negro soldiery have been so few and far
between that, indeed, they may be said to have ceased
altogether. It ran as follows, and appeared in the _Herald_
the morning after the banquet as a portion of the report of
the speeches and festivities:

"SAMBO'S RIGHT TO BE KIL'T.

(_Air--The Low-Backed Chair._)

Some say it is a burnin' shame
To make the naygurs fight,
An' that the thrade o' being kilt
Belongs but to the white;
But as for me, upon me sowl,
So liberal are we here,
I'll let Sambo be murthered in place o' meself
On every day in the year.
On every day in the year, boys,
An' every hour in the day,