We left New Market at noon, Saturday, September 24th, and marched all the afternoon and all night, past Harrisonburg, Mount Crawford, Mount Sidney, and Willow Springs, reaching Staunton, Va., about nine in the morning. On the march, forty-three miles in twenty-one hours, we were hungry; for the morning ration at New Market was scanty, and they gave us nothing more, except a small loaf of wheat bread. Some of the guard were kind to us. One of them, private John Crew, Co. E, 11th Alabama Regiment, unsolicited by us, and, so far as I am aware, without hope of any reward, would endeavor to bring us apples or other food, whenever we halted. I was careful to write his name in my diary. As we trudged along, a lively discussion of slavery ensued. Lieutenant Howard of the provost guard was a learned champion of the "peculiar institution," and I was a pronounced abolitionist. He was an ardent "fire-eater," to use the term then in vogue, and I, who had lost my position as principal of the Worcester High School by my defense of John Brown, was equally intense. Both were pretty well "posted" on the subject. He seemed to be familiar with the Bible and the proslavery arguments, including drunken Noah's "Cursed Canaan!" Moses Stuart's _Conscience and the Constitution_, Nehemiah Adams's _Southside View of Slavery_, and Rev. Dr. ---- (the name is gone from me) of Baltimore's Sermons. I was fresh from reading the arguments of George B. Cheever, Horace Bushnell, Henry Ward Beecher, Garrison, Phillips, and the rest. He proved that slavery among the Hebrews was a divine institution. I answered they were commanded to "undo the heavy burdens, let the oppressed go free, and break every yoke." He said Paul sent back the fugitive slave Onesimus to his master Philemon; I rejoined, "Paul said, 'I send him back, not as a servant, but above a servant, a brother beloved; receive him as myself.'" He quoted the Constitution of the United States, the article commanding that fugitive slaves should be delivered back to their masters; in reply I quoted from Deuteronomy the "Higher Law," "Thou shalt _not_ deliver unto his master the servant which is escaped from his master unto thee." He quoted from the great speech of the magnificent Webster in the Senate, March 7, 1850, in which he urged all good citizens to obey the Fugitive Slave Law "with alacrity." Waxing hot, I quoted from Beecher: