lines just as the sun was going down. Captain
Hatch, who had accompanied us, waved his flag as we halted near a grove
of trees, and a young officer rode over to us from the nearest
picket-station. We despatched him to General Foster for a pair of
horses, and in half an hour entered the General's tent. He pressed us to
remain to dinner, proposing to kill the fatted calf,--"for these my sons
were dead and are alive again, were lost and are found."

We let him kill it, (it tasted wonderfully like salt pork,) and in half
an hour were on our way to General Butler's head-quarters.

* * * * *

Here ended our last day in Dixie, and here, perhaps, should end this
article; but the time has come when I can disclose my real purpose in
seeking an audience of the Rebel leader; and as such a disclosure may
relieve me, in the minds of candid men, from some of the aspersions cast
upon my motives by Rebel sympathizers, I willingly make it. In making
it, however, I wish to be understood as speaking only for myself. My
companion, Colonel Jaquess, while he fully shared in my motives, and
rightly estimated the objects I sought to accomplish, had other, and, it
may be, higher aims. And I wish also to say, that to him attaches
whatever credit is due to any one for the conception and execution of
this "mission." While I love my country as well as any man, and in this
enterprise cheerfully perilled my life to serve it, I was only his
co-worker: I should not have undertaken it alone.

No reader of this magazine is so young as not to remember, that, between
the first of June and the first of August last, a Peace simoom swept
over the country, throwing dust into the people's eyes, and threatening
to bury the nation in disunion. All at once the North grew tired of the
war. It began to count the money and the blood it had cost, and to
overlook the great principles for which it was waged. Men of all shades
of political opinion--radical Republicans, as well as honest
Democrats--cried out for concession, compromise, armistice,--for
anything to end the war,--anything but disunion. To that the North would
not consent, and peace I knew could not be had without it, I knew that,
because on the sixteenth of June, Jeff. Davis had said to a prominent
Southerner that he would negotiate only on the basis of Southern
Independence, and that declaration had come to me only five days after
it was made.

The people, therefore, were