Then our delight was boundless. We had awakened from a hideous nightmare-dream to find that all its shapes of horror and grinning fiends had passed away and left us in the sunlight once more. Our hearts kept time with the glad threshing of our wheels on the water, and sang within us, knowing that each ponderous stroke was placing a greater distance between us and our dreaded foes. The hearty, cheerful welcome we met on board was no small element in our pleasure. We were hungry--no wonder after a year's fasting--and we were fed,--the only difficulty being to avoid hurtful excess. With a full supply of provisions and a large tin cup of coffee--I am not sure that so good a cup of coffee has been made since--I sat down and ate slowly, as if I could never have enough. Then I wandered all over the boat, from the upper deck and the cabin down to the hold, in the mere wantonness of liberty. To go about with no guard watching me was as strange as it was delightful. The act of going up to, and passing unchecked through a door, was a great pleasure! I saw little of the country through which we passed, for the mind was too busy. No emotion on earth has the same sweep and intensity as the throbbing sensations that rush through the bosom of the liberated captive! I have no recollection whatever of the lower James, of Fortress Monroe, of the Chesapeake. In all my memoranda no word occurs of these things. Whether the hours were spent in sleep or waking, whether the monotony of happiness obliterated memory, or nature, weakened by disease and exhausted by too great a multiplicity of sensations, refused to receive new impressions, I know not; but not until we were near Washington can I again recall passing events. Then we thronged to the vessel's side, and bent loving eyes upon the snowy front of our beautiful Capitol. It seemed a far more grand and fitting emblem of our country's power now than when I had first looked upon it, an inexperienced boy, in the far-away opening of the war, though only two years had elapsed since that time. In those two years the whole country had learned many lessons, and to me they were an age!