“By the way, I believe I’ll send you a lock of my hair, cut just over my left ear, where you used to think it curled so nicely. Perhaps it will enhance its value if you know I severed it with a bowie knife, such as I now carry with me. Tell Rose I’ll send her a calico dress by and by. It will be the most costly present I can make her if the blockade is carried out, but it won’t be; that old Bull across the sea will be goring you with his horns first you know. Then you’ll have a sweet time up there, beset before and behind, and possibly annexed to Canada. But I don’t want to make you feel any bluer than you are probably feeling, so good-bye, good-bye. “Your affectionate Rebel, “JAMES M. CARLETON.” “P. S.—I shall send this to Washington by a chap who is going to desert, you know, and join the Federals with a pitiful story about having been pressed into the Rebel service, telling them, too, how poor and weak and demoralized we are,—how a handful of troops can lick us, and so draw them into our web, as a spider tempts a fly, don’t you see? They offered me that honor, knowing that a son of GEORGE CARLETON, twice M. C. from Massachusetts, and now defunct, would be above suspicion, and would thus gather a heap of items. But hang me, if I could turn spy on any terms. So I respectfully declined. You see I am quite a somebody, owing to my having had sense enough to wait until I was twenty-one, ere I ran away, and so bringing a part of my property with me. Money makes the mare go here as elsewhere, but I’m about running out. I wish you could send me a few thousand, can’t you?” And this was Jimmie’s letter, over which the mother had wept far bitterer tears than any she shed when her eldest born bade her his last farewell, giving to her, just as Jimmie had done, a lock of his brown hair. She had it with her now, and she laid them both on Rose’s hand,—the dark brown lock, and the short black silken curl, which twined itself around Rose’s finger, as if it loved the snowy resting-place. Rose’s first impulse was to shake it off as if it had been a guilty thing; but the sight of it recalled so vividly the handsome, saucy face, and laughing, mischievous black eyes it once had helped to shade, that she pressed it to her lips, and whispered sadly, “Dear Jimmie, I cannot hate him if I try, nor see how he is greatly at fault,” while in her heart was the unframed prayer that God would care for the Rebel-boy, and bring him back to them.