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There's but a shirt and a half in all my company, and the half shirt is two napkins pinned together and thrown over the shoulders.

KING HENRY IV.

OUR emaciated condition, hard labor, and the bracing mountain air, conspired to make us ravenous. In quantity, the pork and corn-bread which we devoured was almost miraculous; in quality, it seemed like the nectar and ambrosia of the immortal gods. It was far better adapted to our necessities than the daintiest luxuries of civilization. In California, Australia, and Colorado goldmines, on the New Orleans levée, and wherever else the most trying physical labor is to be performed, pork and corn-bread have been found the best articles of food.

The Loyalists were all ready to feed, shelter, and direct us, but reluctant to accompany us far from their homes. They would say:

"You need no guides; the road is so plain, that you cannot possibly miss it."

But midnight journeys among the narrow lanes and obscure mountain-paths had taught us that we could miss any road whatever which was not inclosed upon both sides by fences too high for climbing. Therefore, we insisted upon pilots.

Fortunately, I had left Salisbury with a one-hundreddollar United States note concealed under the hem of each leg of my pantaloons, just above the instep, and two more sewn in the lining of my coat. I had in my portmonnaie

470

IMMINENT PERIL OF UNION CITIZENS.

[1865.

fifty dollars in Northern bank-notes, five dollars in gold, and a hundred dollars in Confederate currency. Davis brought away about the same amount. We should have left it with our fellow-prisoners, but for the probability of being recaptured and confined, where money would serve us in our extremest need. Now it enabled us to remunerate amply both our white and black friends. Sometimes the mountaineers would say:

"We do not do these things for money. We have fed and assisted hundreds of refugees and escaping prisoners, but never received a cent for it."

Those whom they befriended were usually penniless. We appreciated their kindness none the less because fortunate enough to be able to recompense them. They were unable to resist the argument that, when our forces came, they would need "green-backs" to purchase coffee.

Every man who gave us a meal, sheltered us in his house or barn, pointed out a refuge in the woods, or directed us one mile upon our journey, did it at the certainty, if discovered, of being imprisoned, or forced into the Rebel army, whether sick or well, and at the risk of having his house burned over his head. In many cases, discovery would have resulted in his death by shooting, or hanging in sight of his own door.

During our whole journey we entered only one house inhabited by white Unionists, which had never been plundered by Home Guards or Rebel guerrillas. Almost every loyal family had given to the Cause some of its nearest and dearest. We were told so frequently-"My father was killed in those woods;" or, "The guerrillas shot my brother in that ravine," that, finally, these tragedies made little impression upon us. The mountaineers never seemed conscious that they were doing any heroic or self-sacrificing thing. Their very sufferings

1865.]

FORDING CREEKS AT MIDNIGHT.

471

had greatly intensified their love for the Union, and their faith in its ultimate triumph.

Drowsily wondering at our capacity for sleep, we dozed through the first day of the New Year, and the fifteenth of our liberty. After dark we spent two hours in the house before the log fire. The good woman had one son already escaped to the North-a fresh link which bound her mother-heart to that ideal paradise. She fed us, mended our clothing, and parted from us with the heartiest "God bless you!"

Her youngest born, a lad of eleven years, accompanied us five miles to the house of a Unionist, who received us without leaving his bed. He gave us such minute information about the faint, obscure road that we found little difficulty in keeping it.

Through the biting air we pressed rapidly up the narrow valley of a clear, tumbling mountain stream, whose frowning banks, several hundred feet in hight, were covered with pines and hemlocks. In twelve miles the road crossed the creek twenty-nine times. Instead of bridges were fords for horsemen and wagons, and foot-logs for pedestrians. Cold and stiff, we discovered. that crossing the smooth, icy logs in the darkness was a hazardous feat. Wolfe was particularly lame, and slipped several times into the icy torrent, but managed to flounder out without much delay. He endured with great serenity all our suggestions, that even though water was his native element, he had a very eccentric taste to prefer swimming to walking, in that state of the atmosphere.

At one crossing the log was swept away. We wandered up and down the stream, which was about a hundred feet wide, but could find not even the hair which Mahomet discovered to be the bridge over the bottomless pit. But as canoes are older than ships, so legs are more

472 "LOOPED AND WINDOWED RAGGEDNESS."

[1865

primitive than bridges. We e'en plunged in, waist deep, and waded through, among the cakes of floating ice.

Our wardrobes were suffering quite as much as our persons. We did not carry looking-glasses, so I am not able to speak of myself; but my colleague was a subject for a painter. Any one seeing him must have been convinced that he was made up for the occasion; that his looped and windowed raggedness never could have resulted from any natural combination of circumstances. The fates seemed to decree that as "Junius" went naked into the Confederacy (leaving most of his wardrobe on deposit at the bottom of the Mississippi), he should come out of it in the same condition.

Overcoat he had none. Pantaloons had been torn to shreds and tatters by the brambles and thorn-bushes. He had a hat which was not all a hat. It was given to him, after he had lost his own in a Rebel barn, by a warm-hearted African, as a small tribute from the Intelligent Contraband to his old friend the Reliable Gentleman -by an African who felt with the most touching propriety that it would be a shame for any correspondent of The Tribune to go bareheaded as long as a single negro in America was the owner of a hat! It was a white wool relic of the old-red-sandstone period, with a sugar-loaf crown, and a broad brim drawn down closely over his ears, like the bonnet of an Esquimaux.

His boots were a stupendous refutation of the report that leather was scarce among the Rebels. I understood it to be no figure of rhetoric, but the result of actual and exact measurement, which induced him to call them the "Seven-Leaguers." The small portion of his body, which was visible between the tops of his boots and the bottom of his hat, was robed in an old gray quilt of Secession proclivities; and taken for all in all, with his

[graphic]

THE ESCAPE.-WADING A MOUNTAIN STREAM AT MIDNIGHT.

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