A little east of Lynchburg, an officer in the national uniform happened to pass through the cars. “There’s one of the infernal villains,” exclaimed an old man in homespun behind me. “Well,” said his companion, “perhaps it isn’t right to talk so, but how can we help hating them? They’ve burned our houses and made us paupers, and now they kick us out of the Capitol. May be my sons may feel differently, by the time they’re as old as I am, if they have to live with them, but I always expect to hate the sight of a Yankee till my dying day.” These were plain old Virginians from the mountains, apparently farmers. At Grand Junction, Tennessee, I whiled away half a day in the bar-room of a dilapidated little frame house called a hotel. A wood contractor from one of the interior towns of Northern Mississippi was the leading talker. For hisself, he’d rather be a pauper all his days than do business with the dirty, mean, low-down Yankees. Certainly four out of every five in the room at any period during that half day, in some form or another re-echoed the sentiment. On the cars of the Mississippi Central Railroad, a party of girls, attended by one or two rustic beaux, going down to New Orleans to see the sights and have their winter “society,” monopolized the conversation, and did it in no whispered tones. The burden of all their discourse, the staple subject that never failed them—when questions as to how long Sam stayed the other night when he came to see Sally, were fully exhausted—the _pièce de résistance_ to which they always reverted, was the meanness, the ignorance, the hatefulness, the cowardice of the detested Yankees. One had to leave school because the dirty Yankees were too near. Another’s “par” had lost all his house servants because the sneaking Yankees had enticed them away. Another knew that the Yankees were all cowards, and would never have overpowered us if they hadn’t called in the Dutch, Irish, niggers, and all the rest of their superiors in creation, to help them. “Didn’t my brother Tom—you know, Lizzie, he’s as brave and gallant a man as ever lived—didn’t he tell me hisself, with his own lips, that he chased five of ’em, in full uniforms, with swords in their hands, and plenty of revolvers, full gallop, out of Holly Springs? His own self, mind you, by hisself.” The presence of an officer in uniform in the car, part of the day, only served to increase the volubility and virulence with which these Mississippi ladies delivered their utterances.