communities of the North-west. In February, 1865, with the fall of Fort Fisher and the capture of Wilmington, the control of the coast of the Confederacy became complete. The Southerners and their friends in Great Britain and the Bahamas (a group of friends whose sympathies for the cause were very much enhanced by the opportunity of making large profits out of their friendly relations) had shown during the years of the War exceptional ingenuity, daring, and persistence in carrying on the blockade-running. The ports of the British West Indies were very handy, and, particularly during the stormy months of the winter, it was hardly practicable to maintain an absolutely assured barrier of blockades along a line of coast aggregating about two thousand miles. The profits on a single voyage on the cotton taken out and on the stores brought back were sufficient to make good the loss of both vessel and cargo in three disastrous trips. The blockade-runners, Southerners and Englishmen, took their lives in their hands and they fairly earned all the returns that came to them. I happened to have early experience of the result of the fall of Fort Fisher and of the final closing of the last inlet for British goods. I was at the time in prison in Danville, Virginia. I was one of the few men in the prison (the group comprised about a dozen) who had been fortunate enough to retain a tooth-brush. We wore our tooth-brushes fastened into the front button-holes of our blouses, partly possibly from ostentation, but chiefly for the purpose of keeping them from being stolen. I was struck by receiving an offer one morning from the lieutenant of the prison guard of $300 for my tooth-brush. The "dollars" meant of course Confederate dollars and I doubtless hardly realised from the scanty information that leaked into the prison how low down in February, 1865, Confederate currency had depreciated. But still it was a large sum and the tooth-brush had been in use for a number of months. It then leaked out from a word dropped by the lieutenant that no more English tooth-brushes could get into the Confederacy and those of us who had been studying possibilities on the coast realised that Fort Fisher must have fallen.