broken up, never, never to be restored on this side of the grave”. His family had been made refugees three different times, and Maury had been much concerned over their needs and probable sufferings. He wrote in the summer of 1864 to Dr. Tremlett from the Duke of Buckingham’s palace at Stow, “I had a letter to-day of May 7th from my daughter Nannie, and she says, ‘Flour has gone to $100 per barrel—too high for us—but meal is cheaper, thank God!’... ‘We had for dinner to-day soup made out of nothing, and afterwards a shin. ’Twas good, I tell you; we all dote on shins’. And again, from my little Lucy, ‘Ham and mashed potatoes to-day for dinner; and, as it was my birthday (9th May), Mamma said I might eat as much as I wanted’. Here, you see, there is no complaining, but only a gentle lifting of the curtain, which in their devotion and solicitude they have kept so closely drawn before me. With this pitiful picture in my mind’s eye, I felt as if I must choke with the sumptuous viands set before me on the Duke’s table. Alas, my little innocents!” So it was with a heavy heart and the future all dark that he and his young son set sail, after an absence of more than two years, for home,—the home which Maury himself was not to see until several more years of exile had been spent in foreign lands. CHAPTER XIII WITH MAXIMILIAN IN MEXICO When Maury reached St. Thomas in the West Indies, about the middle of May, 1865, he learned from the newspapers that the Confederacy had completely collapsed, but he continued his voyage to Havana. From here his son Matthew, Jr. was sent on home to Virginia; while Maury himself waited to consider what was best for him to do—an old man now broken in health and ruined in finances, separated from family and friends, and without home or country. Though he had saved practically nothing from the wreck of his financial fortunes, caused by the war, yet his sterling honesty would not permit him to sell the torpedo material and appropriate the money, to which he then had as good a right as any other individual. His conduct of the affairs of the Confederacy in England had been marked with this same scrupulous honesty, in the expenditure of nearly $400,000. Before leaving that country, all the vouchers for that sum were turned over to Bulloch, correct to a figure, as attested by the following letter: “Neither can I close this, perhaps my last letter on business matters, without observing that although the custom here would have sanctioned your receiving a large _per centum_ in the way of commission on contracts, purchases, and disbursements made by me, yet you constantly set your face against it and never to my certain knowledge received one shilling”.