“What is the matter outside?” she eagerly inquired. He hesitated a moment, glanced at her anxious countenance, and then, with a harsh laugh, he answered: “Don’t you know? The Army of the Potomac is utterly destroyed. Grant and all his generals are taken prisoners, and are on their way to the city. And the mob mean to lynch them, if the president and the general don’t prevent it.” “My God!” exclaimed Britomarte; and the cup of gruel fell untasted from her hands. Having told this bitter falsehood, the guard picked up the fragments of the broken cup, and, laughing sarcastically, left the cell, and locked the door. Britomarte remained with her hands lifted in appeal to Heaven. Did she then believe the terrible tale? Not entirely; nor did the mocking guard expect that she would do so. But she was enfeebled and enervated in body and mind by her long solitary confinement; and she succumbed to the shock of that announcement before she could reflect upon its improbability. When, however, she had time to recover her composure, and to arrange her thoughts, she perceived that the guard had gone too far in hinting that the mob proposed to lynch the illustrious prisoners said to have been taken. And in utterly rejecting this part of the story as impossible, she was led to question the whole of it as improbable. Though this conclusion saved her from despair, it did not moderate her anxiety. She pressed her face to the bars of her prison window, and watched and listened with “all” her eyes and ears to discover if possible the true cause of all the uproar in the city. The night was now quite dark, or would have been so but for the gas lamps at the corners. A torrent of human beings rushed through the streets, a confusion of many tongues rose on the air. “What _can_ be the matter?” she asked of herself for the hundredth time. “If there really should have been a recent Confederate victory, as the guard stated, I shall soon know. In that case there will be an impromptu and partial illumination to-night, and a concerted and general one to-morrow night.” But the hours crept on towards midnight, and there was no illumination. Meanwhile the multitude of people, ever increasing in number and gathering in force, continued to roll on like a river with resistless impetuosity through the streets; and the babel of many voices to whirl like a tornado in a ceaseless roar up into the midnight air. Yet these voices were not the utterances of victors; these fierce invectives and deep maledictions were not exclamations of joy or triumph! What could be their purport then? Britomarte could not answer. She could only watch and listen in intense anxiety and awful suspense. At length the bell of some neighboring public building tolled. And simultaneously with this knell there rolled up into the cool night air, against the clear purple sky, a huge, black, crimson and sulphurous volume of smoke!