The meagre fare made me yearn greatly to participate of the food that I knew was being enjoyed at my home and I was not slow in availing myself of any temporary leave I could obtain. One of these occasions took place just shortly before the evacuation of Richmond and upon my return to the Institute I was greeted by an almost empty building. I found the Corps had been called out the night before to go to the front, leaving me as a younger cadet with a number of others as a detail to guard the Institute. For the short time we were in charge, there was of course no lectures and little discipline, each one could go and come as he chose, with the result that my visits to my home board were more interesting and in my saunters along the streets I began to notice on the Saturday prior to the evacuation premonitions of coming trouble. Great activity was suddenly manifested through the various Confederate Government departments. The Cadets at the Institute were extended permission to remove their trunks. This was availed of on Saturday and also on Sunday until the Institute was practically abandoned by every one there, but was filled with the furniture and the trunks of all the absent cadets, except of those few who had friends to take charge of them. Besides my own trunk I was able to care for that of another room mate and sent it to him by express to his home some weeks later. On Sunday morning the 2d of April, 1865, it was apparent to anyone that the City was to be abandoned by the Confederate troops. Great piles of official documents and papers of all sorts were brought out from the departments, piled up in the centre of the streets in separate piles at short distances apart and then set on fire to be destroyed, some few burned entirely, others only smouldered and others again failed to burn at all. The result seemed to depend on the quality of the paper and the density of the bundles. From one pile I took out a roll of Confederate bonds with all coupons attached and from another pile a bundle of official papers of various sorts. On Monday morning the 3d of April, I saw going up Marshall street about daylight two Confederate cavalrymen on foot who were the very last of the Confederate soldiers to leave Richmond. On the same morning about eleven o’clock I saw the first Union soldier to enter Richmond. He was also a cavalryman, riding up Broad street and was near Tenth street when I saw him and was surrounded and followed by a howling, frantic mob of about five hundred negro boys, there being no other person except myself that I could see on the street in the vicinity. Between these two periods, the going of the last Confederates and the coming of the first Union soldier, stirring scenes were being elsewhere enacted. I had first gone out to the Institute to see how matters stood there and I found it was in possession of a horde of men, women and children from all the neighborhood around, who had