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meet with signs of military operations, — skirmish-lines, riflepits, and graves by the roadside.

Rising a gentle ascent, we had a view of the Court-House, and of the surrounding country, - barren, hilly fields, with here and there a scattered tree, or clump of trees, commonly pines, and boundaries of heavier timber beyond. There were breast works running in various directions, — along by the road, across the road, and diagonally over the crests. The country was all cut up with them; and I found the Rebel works strangely mixed up with our own. As our army advanced, it had possessed itself of the enemy's rifle-pits, skirmish-line, and still more important intrenchments, and converted them to its own

use.

Grant's main line of breastworks, very heavy, constructed of rails and stakes and earth, crosses the road at nearly right angles, and stretches away out of sight on either side over the hills and into the woods. I was reminded of what Elijah had told me the day before at Brock's Road, in the Wilderness. "Grant's breastworks run thirty miles through the country, from near Ely's Ford on the Rapidan, spang past Spottsylvany Court-House and the Mattapony River."

The road to the Court-House runs south. On the left was Beverly's house, and a shattered empty house on the right Richard pointed out the hill on which his battery was stationed early in the battle. "We had to git away f'om dar, though.

Your batteries drove us."

We rode on to the Court-House: a goodlybrick building, with heavy pillars in front, one of which had been broken off by a shell, leaving a corner of the portico hanging in the air. There were but six other buildings of any importance in the place, one jail, one tavern, (no school-house,) one private dwelling, and three churches; all of brick, and all more or less battered by artillery.

Entering the Court-House amid heaps of rubbish which littered the yard about the doors, I had the good fortune to find the county clerk at his desk. He received me politely, and offered to show me about the building. It had been well

riddled by shot and shell; but masons and carpenters were at work repairing damages; so that there was a prospect of the county, in a few months, having a court-house again.

"What is most to be regretted," the clerk said, "is the destruction of documents which can't be restored. All the records and papers of the court were destroyed by the Union soldiers after they got possession." And he showed me a room heaped with the fragments. It looked like a room in a rag-man's warehouse.

Returning to his office, he invited me to sit down, and commenced talking freely of the condition and prospects of the country. The area of corn-land planted was small; but the soil had been resting two or three years, the season had been favorable, and the result was an excellent crop. "We shall probably have a surplus to dispose of for other necessaries." The county had not one third the number of horses, nor one tenth the amount of stock, it had before the war. Many families were utterly destitute. They had nothing whatever to live upon until the corn-harvest; and many would have nothing then. The government had been feeding as many as fifteen hundred persons at one time.

"How many of these were blacks?"

"Perhaps one fifth."

"How large a proportion of the population of the county are blacks?"

"Not quite one half."

"The colored population require proportionately less assistance, then, than the white?" He admitted the fact. "How happens it?" I inquired; for he had previously told me the old hackneyed tale, that the negroes would not work, and that in consequence they were destined to perish like the Indians.

"They'll steal," said he; and he made use of this expression, which he said was proverbial: "An honest nigger is as rare as a lock of har on the palm of my hand."

"But," I objected, "it seems hardly possible for one class of people to live by stealing in a country you describe as so destitute."

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"A nigger will live on almost nothing," he replied. "It is n't to be denied, however, but that some of them work."

He criticised severely the government's system of feeding the destitute. "Hundreds are obtaining assistance who are not entitled to any. They have only to go to the overseers of the poor appointed by government, put up a poor mug, and ask for a certificate in a weak voice; they get it, and come and draw their rations. Some draw rations both here and at Fredericksburg, thus obtaining a double support, while they are well able to work and earn their living, if left to themselves. The system encourages idleness, and does more harm than good. All these evils could be remedied, and more than half the expense saved the government, if it would intrust the entire management of the matter in the hands of citizens."

"Is it the whites, or the blacks, who abuse the government's bounty?"

"The whites."

"It appears, then, that they have the same faults you ascribe to the blacks they are not over-honest, and they will not work unless obliged to."

"Yes, there are shiftless whites to be sure. There's a place eight miles west from here, known as Texas, inhabited by a class of poor whites steeped in vice, ignorance, and crime of every description. They have no comforts, and no energy to work and obtain them. They have no books, no morality, no religion; they go clothed like savages, half sheltered, and half fed, except that government is now supporting them." "Do the whites we are feeding come mostly from that region?"

"O, no; they come from all over the county. Some walk as far as twenty miles to draw their fortnight's or three weeks' rations. Some were in good circumstances before the war; and some are tolerably well off now. A general impression prevails that this support comes from a tax on the county; so every man, whether he needs it or not, rushes in for a share. It is impossible to convince the country people that it is the United States government that is feeding them. Why,

sir, there are men in the back districts who will not yet believe that the war is over, and slavery at an end!"

"It appears," said I, "that ignorance is not confined to the region you call Texas; and that, considering all things, the whites are even more degraded than the blacks. Why does n't some prophet of evil arise and predict that the white race, too, will die out because it is vicious and will not work?"

"The whites are a different race, sir, a different race," was the emphatic, but not very satisfactory reply. "The negro cannot live without the care and protection of a master."

"You think, then, the abolition of slavery a great misfortune?"

"A great misfortune to the negroes, certainly; but not to the whites: we shall be better off without them."

"It is singular that the negroes have no fear of the fate you predict for them. They say, on the contrary, We have been supporting our masters and their families all our lives, and now it is a pity if we cannot earn a living for ourselves.'"

"Well, I hope they will succeed!"

This is the reply the emancipated slave-owners almost invariably make to the above argument; sometimes sarcastically, sometimes gravely, sometimes commiseratingly, but always incredulously. "The negro is fated;" this is the real or pretended belief; and this they repeat, often with an ill-concealed spirit of vindictiveness, an "I-told-you-so!" air of triumph, until one is forced to the conclusion that their prophecy is their desire.

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CHAPTER XVII.

THE FIELD OF SPOTTSYLVANIA.

I WALKED on to the tavern where Richard H. Hicks was baiting his horse. The landlord took me to a lumberroom where he kept, carefully locked up, a very remarkable curiosity. It was the stump of a tree, eleven inches in diameter, which had been cut off by bullets-not by cannon-shot, but by leaden bullets in the Spottsylvania fight. It looked like a colossal scrub-broom. "I had a stump twice as big as this, cut off by bullets in the same way, only much smoother; but some Federal officers took it from me and sent it to the War Department at Washington."

He had many battle-scars about his house to show; one of which I remember: "A shell come in through the wall thar, wrapped itself up in a bed that stood hyer, and busted in five pieces."

In one of the rooms I found a Union officer lying on a lounge, sick with the prevailing fever. He seemed glad to see a Northern face, and urged me to be seated.

"It is fearfully lonesome here; and just now I have no companion but the ague."

Learning that he had been some time in command of the post, I inquired the reason why the citizens appeared so eager to save the government expense in feeding their poor.

"It is very simple: they wish to get control of the business in order to cut off the negroes. They had rather have the assistance the government affords withdrawn altogether, than that the freedmen should come in for a share. It is their policy to keep the blacks entirely dependent upon their former masters, and consequently as much slaves as before."