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 1865.3 STORIES ABOUT THE WAR. 473 pale, nervous face and his remarkable costume, he looked like a cross between the Genius of Intellectuality and a Rebel bushwhacker! Before daylight, we shiveringly tapped on the door of a house at the foot of the Blue Ridge. "Come in," was the welcome response. Entering, we found a woman sitting by the log fire. Beginning to introduce ourselves, she interrupted: "O, I know all about you. You are Yankee prisonYour friends who passed last evening told us you were coming, and I have been sitting up all night for you. Come to the fire and dry your clothes." ers. For two hours we listened to her tales of the war. The history of almost every Union family was full of romance. Each unstoried mountain stream had its incidents of daring, of sagacity, and of faithfulness; and almost every green hill had been bathed in that scarlet dew from which ever springs the richest and the ripest fruit. Concealment here was difficult; so we were taken to the house of a neighbor, who also was waiting to welcome us. He took us to his storehouse, right by the road-side. "The Guard," said he, "searched this building last Thursday, unsuccessfully, and are hardly likely to try it again just yet." Soon, lying near a fire upon a warm feather-bed, we wooed the drowsy god with all the success which the hungry Salisbury vermin, sticking closer than brothers, would permit. XVI. Monday, January 2. Before night the guide returned from conducting Boothby's party, and assured us that the coast was |