grand army, which I watched for days and weeks defiling through Washington, should not have swept all before it; and I confess, that I still believe its failure was due to want of generalship. The nation, at any rate, at that time was confident, proud of its General, proud of its army, proud of its coming victory; and when the "Young Napoleon,"-with that affectation of the Napoleonic style he was so partial to-declared in the address he issued, almost on the day of which I write, that hereafter his troops "would ask no higher honour "than the proud consciousness that they belonged to the army of the Potomac," he uttered a boast which found an echo in every Northern breast.

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My companions on the excursion, among whom were Mr. Hawthorne and Mr. N. P. Willis, were all Northerners; and all of them, the ladies especially, showed a natural feeling of pride at the appearance of the troops about to start on that ill-fated expedition. It struck me, however, curiously at the time, how all the party talked about our excursion as if we were going to visit a strange country. The sacred soil of Virginia seemed as imperfectly known to them as Ireland is to myself; and they looked upon their excursion with much the same sort of interest as I should do on a trip across St. George's Channel.

Half an hour's sail brought us to Alexandria. Like most of the old Virginia and Maryland towns, it has a very English air about it: the red brick houses, the

broad sleepy streets, the long straggling wharves might have been imported direct from Norfolk or Lincolnshire. The town itself was crammed with troops; but neither then nor on the other occasions when I visited it was there anything to be seen of the inhabitants. They had left the place for the most part, or lived in retirement. Closely connected as the little town is with Washington, it was bitterly "secesh;" and the citizens of Alexandria showed their dislike of the Federal army of occupation by every means in their power. The women, as may be supposed, displayed their animosity most outspokenly. Unless they were foully belied, they used to take pleasure in insulting the private soldiers with epithets which will not bear repetition. The common Yankee soldiers seemed to feel these insults from women with a susceptibility I felt it hard to account for. English soldiers, under like circumstances, would have retorted with language still more unmentionable, or would have adopted the spirit of General Butler's famous order without compunction. But the Americans appeared to writhe under these insults. The bad language of the Alexandria women was constantly complained of in the papers as a bitter personal injury. I remember one stalwart Massachusetts soldier in the hospital, who complained seriously, that when he was recovered, and went back to duty, he should be subjected again to the abuse of these Southern ladies; and said "It was so hard to bear." It was here, by

the

way, that the first blood shed in the war was spilt by the murder of Lieutenant Ellsworth, when hoisting up the Union flag at the first outbreak of secession. A flag-staff, bearing the stars and stripes, had been erected on the house where he was killed; and, on that morning, it floated bravely in the sunlight, as though in honour of the approaching Union triumphs.

At the wharf, a train was waiting to convey our party. It was the first which had started, and the resumption of the traffic was the sign of returning peace and order. But the event excited no comment in that sullen, gloomy town, and only a few boys and negroes were collected together to witness our departure. Slowly we moved on through the dead streets till we reached the camps outside the town, and then passing onwards at an increased speed, we were soon in the hilly Virginia country, which a few days before had been occupied by the Confederate forces.

The country through which our road lay impressed me strangely with a sense of desolation. If the reader knows the Surrey downs, near Albury, and can fancy what they would be, if the mansions and cottages were all removed, if the woods were replaced by pine forests, if the place of roads was supplied by mud tracks, and if the whole district was intersected by steep gullies filled with clear sparkling torrent streams, he will have a pretty good notion of what Northern Virginia is like. For miles and miles together you passed through long

tracts of pine-wood, broken by patches of deserted fields, where the brushwood was growing up again amidst the stumps of the forest trees, which had been cleared years ago. Every now and then you came to an open space, where you caught a glimpse of the distant Blue Ridge Mountains, and then you passed again into the gloomy pine-wood shade. Along the journey of twenty miles or so, you never saw a village; and the number of houses that you passed might be counted on your fingers. In the fields there was no one working; the snake fences were broken down; at the roadside stations there were no passengers; and the few people loitering about gazed sullenly at us as we passed. Actual traces of the war there were not many. We passed a few deserted camps, and a house or two which had been burnt down by one of the two armies which had occupied the soil in turn; but that was all. Indeed, the look of desolation could have proceeded but partially from the presence of the war. I never saw the same aspect elsewhere, even in States which had suffered as much from invasion. The state of the fields and fences, and roads and farmhouses, betokened a decay of much longer standing than that of a year's time. The exhaustion of the soil, even more than the havoc of men, was the cause of the deserted air which hung over everything. With the wasteful system of tobacco-growing and slave labour, Virginia is rapidly sinking back into its primitive desolation.

At last we emerged from the pine-woods, and began to ascend by a steep incline-an open table-land—at whose foot run the now famous stream of Bull Run. Here we had to move slowly, and stop every few hundred yards to remove huge logs, which had been rolled across the rails to obstruct the passage. Then, reaching the top of the incline, we found ourselves in the centre of Manassas camp. It had hardly yet been visited since the departure of the Confederates; everything which could be destroyed had been burnt before their retreat; and the whole ground for miles was covered with the débris of an army's stores. Smashed carriages, broken arms, empty coffins, charred planks, decaying skeletons of horses, pots, pans, and cartridges, lay heaped together in a weird disorder. A detachment of Federal soldiers were on duty there, collecting any remnants of the stores which were worth preserving; but, otherwise, there was not a soul visible. The few soldiers' huts which were left standing were knocked hastily together with the rudest planks, and swarmed inside with vermin of every description. A foul smell of charred animal matter hung about the place, and flights of crows were feeding upon the garbage strewn on every side. The whole ground was covered with stray leaves of tracts and bibles, which some Southern religious society had obviously been distributing amongst the troops. Letters, too, were to be picked up by dozens; and, indeed, the collectors of