bridge at 3 P. M., and bivouacked three miles south of Bowling Green for the night. Hindman, being farther in the rear, lost a few of his scouts, and had hardly time to blow up the bridges over Barren river when the head of the enemy's column came into sight, and immediately commenced shelling the railroad depot and that portion of the track on which were lying the freight trains. These they succeeded in firing finally. When the retreat of the army commenced, Breckinridge's brigade was constituted the rear guard--General Hardee, however, being still in rear with the cavalry and light artillery. Notwithstanding the fact that cold, freezing, and intensely inclement weather set in; notwithstanding the fact that evidences of the demoralization which a retreat in the presence of an enemy always produces were too apparent in many divisions of the army, yet the soldierly manner in which Breckinridge brought off his brigade, losing not a straggler from the ranks, not a musket or a tent, speaks more creditably for him and for them than the recital perhaps of their deeds of daring in the field could do. In truth, history records no sadder tale than the retreat of the Kentuckians from their native State. For the rest of the army there was yet hope. Far to the South lay their homesteads, and their families rested still in security. Between those homesteads and those families and the advancing foe were innumerable places where battle might be successfully offered, or where at least the sons of the South might rear a rampart of their bodies over which the invader could not pass. Time, political complications, mutations of fortune, to which the most successful commanders are liable, might at any time transform the triumph of the Northmen into disaster and defeat. Months must elapse before the advancing columns of the enemy could reach the South, and ere that time arrived pestilence and malarious disease would, amid the fens and swamps of the gulf States, be crouching in their lair, ready to issue forth and grapple with the rash intruders from a more salubrious clime. But for the Kentuckians all was apparently lost. Behind their retiring regiments were the graves of their fathers, and the hearthstones about which clustered every happy memory of their childhood; there, in the possession of the invader, were the rooftrees beneath which were gathered wives who, with a wifely smile gleaming even through their tears, had bidden their husbands go forth to do battle for the right, promising to greet them with glad hearts when they returned in the hour of triumph; there were the fair faces which for many in that band had made the starlight of their young lives; there were young and helpless children, for whom the future promised but suffering, poverty, destitution, and want; there, too, were the thousands who had with anxious and waiting hearts, groaning beneath the yoke of the oppressor, counted the hours until the footsteps of their deliverers should be heard.