to snow and blow very hard, and oh, how I suffered. I am not able to describe here what I experienced and my tongue seems too short to tell it, but, dear reader, just imagine yourself in my stead, surrounded by rebels on every side, and in a strange country, and clad with an old woolen shirt nearly in tatters and your drawers with one leg gone to the knee, and you can form some idea of what I had to put up with in this cold storm, and a mere walking skeleton at that. I had an average weekly fare of corn hoecake and bacon, and that not averaging once a week. Well, I had been told when I got by the third house that it would be safe to stop. The storm was so severe that I made a mistake and stopped at the third house, and as fate would have it this was the very one that I should have shunned. Here I found a rebel captain from the Eleventh Virginia Cavalry, home on a furlough, and when I knocked and he let me in it must have been three or four o’clock in the morning. I told him I had been directed there by a friend and he seemed to be all right, and placed a feather bed on the hearth of an old-fashioned fireplace, or close to it, and it was not many minutes before I was fast asleep, and really I imagined that I was at home on one of my own mother’s cots, but what was my surprise when I awakened to find myself in the hands of a rebel captain, in full rebel uniform, with bars on his collar. Truly I felt surprised. His wife told me as soon as I arose that I ought to have gone to the next house and there would have found her own folks, who were good Union people. Her husband, the old captain, tried to stop her talk, but it seemed of no avail. She told him if he did not let me go that she would go home. He told me to sit and eat some hoecake and bacon, for he was going to turn me over to the home guards. I felt so bad to think that I was again in the hands of my enemy. I told him that I could not eat, but he commanded very fiercely for me to come, and the look of his wife told me that he needed petting. So I went and ate my supper—not my supper, but dinner, I might choose to call it—but could not eat much, and drank a little corn coffee, and how many tears and such pleading, both on my part and the part of his kind wife, to let me go! At last when pleading ceased and his wife told him that if he did not let me go that she would go home and there remain, with many bitter curses on his lips he started off, with me tagging along after him, down again toward the foot of the mountain. I looked over his side arms and it occurred to me that he had no gun of any kind, nothing but a sword to guard me. So I lagged behind, pretending that I could hardly walk, and I took a good look at his long legs, for he was over six feet tall, and then I started up the side of the mountain with the rebel in full pursuit. I still continued to run the best I could up among the rocks and brush that grew thick on this mountain side. Still the rebel continued to pursue me for some