whole secret to your keeping and discretion. Having thus placed myself in your hands, let us make this agreement binding also upon our heirs and assigns, and to this end I propose that the necessary steps be at once taken. Yours truly, M. F. Maury, Confederate Navy. To Nath. J. Holmes, Esq.” Maury had at this time fully decided to return to the Confederate States in the spring, and was then arranging his affairs in England with that end in view. He hoped to arrive there early enough to make use of his electric mines in the land warfare of the spring campaign. He had recently undergone a surgical operation, and his friends in England were very much opposed to his going home, some of them being of the opinion that by the time he arrived Richmond would have been abandoned and he would have no home to go to. But he conceived it to be his duty to return, as he might be of greater service there than he was abroad. Before the date he had set for sailing, May 2, Lee had surrendered at Appomattox and Lincoln had been assassinated; still Maury did not change his plans, but sailed on the Royal Mail Steamer _Atrato_ with a quantity of insulated wire, copper tanks, magnetic exploders, etc. for Havana with the hope of being able to keep open Galveston or some other port on the coast of Texas. He had worried a great deal about the members of his family who were in the Confederate service. “My dreams”, he wrote in January, 1863, “are nightly of death and mutilation of children and friends”. Just four days after this date his son John, who was at Vicksburg on the staff of General Dabney H. Maury, disappeared while reconnoitering the enemy alone, and was never heard of again.[19] News of this unfortunate event did not reach the father until April 8, 1863, and soon afterwards he wrote as follows on the evils of war: “War is a great scourge, and this has touched you and me and many a good fellow with a heavy hand. As I look out upon the landscape that lies before my window, and see the men and women working in the fields, and the fields smiling to man’s husbandry, when I see no marks of the spoiler, and recognize that each one is safe in his person and secure in his possessions, then it is I see peace, and think of my poor country with a sigh, and, oh, with what reflections. ‘Thoughts on thoughts a countless throng’, bless your hearts—you and John—for comforting, with so much solicitude and affection, my poor dear wife in her affliction! Good brothers are you both. How lovely and beautiful are the memories of my Johnny! I wonder if all parents think of their dead as I do of mine. Bless that sleeping boy! Never did he, in his whole life, do one single act that either displeased or grieved me or his mother. ‘He never offended’. What an epitaph; and how proudly I write it! But where is the end of this war to find us—where you and yours, me and mine, and where so many that are dear and near to us? Our charming circle of relations is, I fear,