"The train got off about eight o'clock, on a cloudy, rainy, muddy, suicidal morning, and the material that composed it was worthy of illustration by Cruikshank. The procession was singularly varied, and supremely bizarre. There were the army-wagons, with sick and wounded soldiers, lumbering heavily along; the paroled prisoners wading through the mire; cotton-buyers, on foot and on horseback; members of the twelve tribes of Israel, with all possible modes of conveyance--in broken buggies, in dilapidated coaches, on bare-boned Rosinantes, on superannuated oxen, with fragmentary reins, rope reins, and no reins; spurring, swearing, hallooing, and gesticulating toward Memphis, in mortal terror lest the rebels would capture them again, and some of their hard-earned gains. Pauvre Juils! They would have excited the pity of a pawnbroker, if he had not known them, so frightened and anxious and disconsolate they looked. They could not have appeared more miserable if they had just learned that a brass watch they had sold for silver had turned out gold. The mule trotted along briskly and quietly enough until he beheld the grotesque vision of the heterogeneously-mounted Israelites. Then he displayed most extraordinary conduct. He pawed, he hawed, he kicked, all the while glancing at the sons of Jerusalem, and braying louder and more discordant every moment. I could not understand the mule's idiosyncrasies. Possibly, I thought, the doctrine of the metempsychosis may be true, and this brute, in the early stages of its development, once have been in love. He has a fit on him now, I fancied--he is once more possessed of a petticoat. Why not? If love converts men into asses, why should not asses, in their maddest moments, act like men in love? The mule's ire was culminating. I dug my spurs into his side. Vain effort! He was bent on mischief, and malignant against the persecuted race. If he had been in the House of Commons, (and many of his brethren are there,) I know he never would have voted for the admission of Jews into the English Parliament. Before I could anticipate his movement, he rushed at several pedestrian Hebrews and kicked the wind out of their stomachs and three pairs of green spectacles from their noses. While endeavoring to recover their glasses, the mule knocked their hats off with his hoofs, and impaired the perfect semicircle of their proboscis, thus imitating the rebels--by destroying their bridges totally. The infuriated brute then ran for an old buggy, and, by supreme perseverance, kicked it over, and its two Hebrew occupants, into the road, where they fell, head-foremost, into the mire, growling profanely, like tigers that have learned German imperfectly, and were trying to swear, in choice Teutonic, about the peculiar qualities of Limburger cheese. In their sudden subversion, the Israelites dropped three fine watches out of their pockets, and the mule, with an unprecedented voracity, and