In May last the South began to pour a stream as hot and ugly as hell itself from the Gulf States through Eastern Tennessee, towards Richmond and Manassas, and Norfolk and Lynchburgh, in the shape of a rebel soldiery armed with side knives and tomahawks, drinking gallons untold of bad whisky, and boasting largely and savagely enough of the things they should do in Washington. (Laughter.) I had an old banner, the stars and stripes, floating from the top of my house, on Main street, in Knoxville, Tennessee, in a conspicuous part of the city. They began to come to pay their respects to us--frequently a regiment at a time. Whole regiments of "wharf rats" from New Orleans and Mobile, as ugly and disgusting as they were vicious, would come at once, now and then, to "give old Brownlow a turn," as they expressed it. They would, _en masse_, come across the river on the bridge, surround my house, yell, throw stones, blackguard my wife and family, dare me to come out of doors, and I now and then accepted their invitations and made them the best bow I could. I have, time and again, gone out and given them very frankly and unreservedly my settled opinion of the whole concern, from Jeff. Davis down, assuring them that my scorn and contempt for them and the Southern Confederacy was unutterable, and then, making them the best bow I could, I would go back into the house and leave them to yell and groan around the house till they saw proper to quit. This course they have steadily kept up all the year. And yet all of this time I was reading in the papers of Charleston, Savannah and Richmond, that the Confederate army was composed of the flower and promise of the Southern States. I told my wife that if those miserable, God-forsaken whelps that were screaming like devils around our house almost half of every day were the _flower_ of the Southern Confederacy, my prayer would be--God save us from the _rabble_.