|ANOTHER class of questions which came before the provost-court at Alexandria excited at the time a large amount of interest; was discussed to some extent by many of the ablest journals of the country; resulted in the payment of several old debts--amounting to many thousands of dollars--in an entirely new way; and as no correct account thereof has ever yet appeared in historical form, we purpose in this chapter to relate the facts and incidents connected with one or two of the cases. Though the causes of the war had been brewing for many, many years; though it was, indeed, as Mr. Seward had long before called it, an "irrepressible conflict," which could only be settled by the sacrifice of thousands of lives and millions of treasure; though threats, louder, deeper, and more ominous, came year after year from Southern States, and that, too, from a class of men whom all acknowledged could act as well as threaten whenever they chose to put their threats into execution,--yet, when the storm did finally burst upon the country, it seemed to tens of thousands in the North like a clap of thunder from a clear sky, so wholly were they unprepared for it. Especially was this true among merchants, and still more especially was it true with that class of merchants who, for many years previously, had been selling goods to Southern merchants, and buying from them cotton, sugar, rice, and tobacco. These merchants had, of course, a great many pleasant personal acquaintances throughout the South; they had often been at their customers' stores, dined with their families, been upon their plantations, visited their sugar-mills, witnessed the workings of their cotton-gins, admired the wonderful power of their cotton-presses, heard their negroes sing while picking the cotton, listened in raptures to the peculiar melodies of the negroes as they stripped the tobacco leaf or rolled it into fragrant cigars, and though, even at such times and in such places, they had frequently heard Southern merchants and Southern planters complain of what they called "Northern interference with slavery" and "Northern oppression because of tariffs," etc., etc., yet it had never occurred to them as possible that the time would come when these same men would try to break loose from the North and set up for themselves a separate confederacy.