Carriages were procured, and under the escort of General Morgan L. Smith, the commanding officer, we drove out through the formidable lines of breast-works that run along the successive ridges back of the town, to the spot where Generals Grant and Pemberton met to agree upon the terms of surrender. All the way up the Mississippi, we had been sympathetically quoting General Butler’s expressions of delight, after his protracted residence in the flat Southern country, at “seeing hills again.” The Vicksburg hills were the first we had seen for a month or more; and we saw quite enough of them. A sudden storm came up; the roads became almost as slippery as ice; the drivers, blinded with the rain, guided their horses badly; and presently one of the carriages was handsomely capsized in the mud, and the other one came within an inch of a similar fate. “Nebber ’n all my born life did so afore, nor nebber will,” protested the chap-fallen driver. From the crest above the unpretending little monument one could trace for miles along the tops of the hills the successive lines of intrenchment, and mark the spots where assault after assault illustrated the various skill of the Generals, and the unvaried gallantry of the soldiers they more than once led to needless slaughter. Cotton already dotted every little spot of arable land within the Rebel lines, and beyond them many a broad field, enriched by Northern blood, was promising a rich harvest to Northern lessees. One, a former Clerk of the Ohio House of Representatives, rode up while we were studying the positions which the respective armies had occupied. He thought there was money down here, and had buried a good deal of it, any way, in these broken ridges.