"Are you? So am I!" "What news have you got?" "Nothing new. Have you any news?" "No, not at present. Come, let us go over to the steamer Arago and get something to drink before we separate. There is an old friend of ours that is commissary clerk aboard of her. He used to live in Holly Springs, Miss., and, when we were in Memphis last winter, he was there engaged in buying mules and smuggling them through the Yankee lines to sell. Let us go over and see him." The Frenchman accompanied me on board the steamboat, and there we found the clerk I had told him about, who took us to the bar and got us something to drink. He also induced the barkeeper to sell me a canteen of whisky, as a favor to a special friend. Having procured the whisky, I prevailed upon the Frenchman to accompany me, and we went up the bank of the river to a secluded place, where we sat down to enjoy ourselves. My companion seemed to relish the whisky much better than I did, and its effects soon made him very communicative, so that I was enabled to draw out a great deal of information concerning his business as a spy. He told me that he was engaged in getting dispatches through the Federal lines at Vicksburg to Generals Johnston and Pemberton. During his visits to the Federal camps at Memphis, to purchase Confederate money, he had noted down the names of the officers in the different regiments, and the companies to which they belonged. With that knowledge, whenever he wanted to get from Chickasaw Landing into our lines, he would go to the Provost-marshal and represent himself as belonging to Captain such-a-one's company, in such a regiment, on detached service, and get a pass to visit his regiment, and with it he could pass our lines. The dispatches of General Johnston were brought across the country, by cavalry, to a point on the Yazoo River above Haines' Bluff. There the spy received them, and crossed over to the opposite side of the river, and then came down the river opposite to Snyder's Bluff; there he would manage to cross at night in a canoe, and land inside of our lines, without being seen. There he would get on board a dispatch-boat and come down to Chickasaw Landing, and there he would procure a pass, as I have explained. From there he would go to Mr. Smith's, who lived between the picket lines at the landing and the troops at the rear of Vicksburg. He would give the dispatches to Mr. Smith's daughter, and she would give them to a servant of hers, a smart, intelligent colored boy, rather small of his age, who would carry them to the river above Vicksburg. He described to me the route the colored boy would take to get to the river. At the river, the colored boy would give them to a fisherman, who staid there, and was engaged in catching fish and selling them to the gun-boatmen and the soldiers. The fisherman had lost a hand while in the rebel army, in the battle of Shiloh, and had been discharged.