But for Snipe and Shorty there came a day of thrilling interest when Captain Beach, of the "First Long Island," together with Keating and Desmond, of the Zouaves, met at the provost-marshal's in Washington, and what a meeting it was! The story of the school-boy days had been told the general, who listened with vivid interest. It was he who planned further movements and arranged the necessary preliminaries at the War Department. Among the few Confederate prisoners in the city at the time were young Grayson, captured as a lieutenant just before Bull Run, and Spottswood, captured as sergeant the night of the rescue in front of Chain Bridge, both of the Virginia cavalry. The latter had wrathfully declined to surrender the watch claimed by Shorty to be stolen property (those were the earliest--the callow--days of the war, when the wishes of prisoners as to their personal property were occasionally respected), and a tremendous scene had ensued. But within three days there appeared at Washington two young gentlemen, Pop's boys, sent thither in response to telegraphic inquiries,--Messrs. Paul Grayson and Clinton Joy,--and they had been taken to the Capitol prison by Captain Winthrop, a former Pop boy, and there had been an interview between the cousins, Northern and Southern; then, a conference between Grayson the Confederate and his bumptious statesman, and then Mr. Spottswood very gracefully surrendered the watch, which Mr. Joy positively and conclusively identified as his own, notwithstanding the obliteration of the name, and Spottswood told how it came into his possession. He had spent some time the previous winter and spring in Mobile, Savannah, and Charleston, had seen a good deal of two young--gentlemen--and he used the word with hesitation--from New York, two brothers by the name of Hulker. There had grown up something of an intimacy. They had money in abundance at first, but finally seemed to run out, and they had to "baw-wo," said Mr. Spottswood, with a blush, from their friends. In fact, they had "baw-woed" so much from friends to whom he had presented them that he felt in honor bound to make it good, and as the young men had to get out of the South in a hurry in May, and he had become suspicious as to their solvency, he had felt compelled, he said it regretfully, to demand some security, and they had left with him diamonds and this watch. The diamonds were at his home in Richmond. The watch he unhesitatingly turned over, as became a gentleman, to its proper owner. When Lieutenant Grayson was told that all this was necessary to clear the good name of the young scholar soldier who had captured him, you can imagine his interest in the case was by no means diminished.