Between Atlanta and Knoxville one passes over the track of the destroyer. Down to Dalton the damage from the war has not been very great; but for the rest of the route, solitary chimneys and the debris of burnt buildings everywhere tell the old, old story. If the country did not reveal it so plainly, it might still be read in the faces of our passengers. Every one of them was a record of some phase of the contest, of its squalor and misery, of its demoralization, of its barbarism, or of its ennoblement. Bright, fair faces that ought to have adorned happy rural homes, grown coarse and brassy, flaunted beside young officers. They were the transformation of the camps—the results of its license and lax morality. Trembling old refugees watched the conductor as he counted their hard-earned gatherings, to see if the little pile of fractional currency would be all exhausted in paying their fare home. Aimless young men in gray, ragged and filthy, seemed, with the downfall of the rebellion they had fought for, to have lost their object in life, and stared stupidly at the clothes and comfortable air of officers and strangers from the North. By the roadside, here and there, might be seen—as I saw on a public corner, in the midst of all the bustle and whirl of Atlanta—a poor, half starved, half naked white woman, gathering her little children about her, and cowering in the gray dawn over the dull embers by which, in dull wretchedness, she had watched through the weary night. And, as one looks over the scene, and takes in the full sense of all this sad destruction, a Major from Longstreet’s staff sits down to talk. “If you of the North want now to conciliate and settle the South, you must do one of three things: re-establish slavery; give the old masters in some way power to compel the negroes to work; or colonize them out of the country, and help us to bring in white laborers!” A handsome man he is; tall, bearded like the pard, brown with campaigning, battered, clad in worn-out Confederate gray, but with good army blue pantaloons, taken, doubtless, from the body of some dead or captured soldier of the Republic. Such waste and destruction all about us; and still these insatiable men—these handsome tigers—want more conciliation!