The cotton veil was becoming very soiled and flecked. November brought out a variety of colors in American affairs, some light with yellow hues, others as dark as the gusty season loves to whirl over a surface ever freezing and thawing. General Scott retired from the chief command of the army, to which General McClellan succeeded; the lean Davis was made high-priest for six years to the Southern fetich, and Mason and Slidell, Confederate commissioners, hurriedly shunning Mr. Welles and his cruisers, were captured by Captain Wilkes off the Trent. They were of course promptly spied by the large, vigilant English telescope, which, in its rapid shifting for the occasion, read English international law backwards, and spelled out our duty from our own precedents. The alacrity with which their surrender was demanded showed that the still anxious young lady had survived the alarm, caused by the unwilling kiss six months before, and was desirous to escape, in precisely the same way, any further impertinences. John C. Breckenridge now climbed down to grasp the depraved prize he had at last so well earned. Elected a Senator of the United States at the close of the Vice-Presidency in the preceding March, he readily took a voluntary oath to support the Constitution of an undivided land; played the spy upon the efforts of its government to thwart the attempts to dissever it; and at the close of the session, unable longer to profit by his office and oath, took a brigadier’s commission and a new oath against a country which had loaded his family and himself with its highest honors. Once the cherished type of a chivalrous gentleman, he engrafted upon the abused name of chivalry definitions more reproachful than those which spring from the addled eccentricities of Don Quixote; his old friends, if any such survive, must long have desired to feel that he had only lost an arm in a service which, undistinguished by any advantage brought to it by a man who had deserted everything for it, sunk the remains of a character once high, and an intellect once brilliant, to a depth compared with which history refuses an example. Others may plead some excuse, more or less admissible, for their armed heresies: Davis, that his was a logical sequence to his lifelong convictions of State supremacy; Toombs, Cobb, Stephens, and others, that their States dragged them out; Floyd, the necessity of putting money in his purse; Wise, the loss of a guiding intelligence. But to not one of these can John C. Breckenridge point to mitigate the just severities of that moral verdict which, in cases of such cumulated guilt, can only appease the general uneasiness at the exhibition of depravity so fathomless, by the most exemplary damages. Looking into the dreadful chasms, down which his example cast so many others; the maimed cripples, the hollow-eyed widows, Justice slain by stabs in the back, exiles from poor homes smitten by the bludgeons of secret agents, even humorous