“How far is it, my boy, by this road to Drainsville?” asked a mud-spattered traveller of a shrewd lad by the roadside. “If you keep on the way that you are heading,” replied the boy, “and can manage the Atlantic and Pacific on horseback, it is 23,999 miles; if you turn your horse’s head and go right back it is one mile.” Such were the comparative distances which the Equestrian Knights of the Woolly Order—had they inquired on New-Year’s morning, 1862—would have found parted them from that desirable end of their weary journey, the pleasant village of Peace. Looking, however, only at the delusive finger-boards which cottonized brains had set up along that way; singing jaunty songs of Southern superiority and Northern low-down manners; and listening to a confused distant cheer, occasionally borne to them by certain winds out of the North and by easterly breezes from Europe, they rode on, fancying that they would soon dismount at their journey’s end, give their splashed animals into the accustomed charge of the old faithful, colored ostlers, and set down to the old dishes of glorious hominy and glorifying homily. Instead, however, of this experience, they met interminable difficulties,—Generals Crittenden and Zollicoffer, jostled out of saddle by General Thomas at Mill Spring, and floundering badly through Kentucky into Tennessee; another set captured at and with Fort Henry, February 6th, by Flag-Officer Foote, whose flotilla kept on, as if little conscious of its impertinent doings, up the Tennessee River as far as Florence, with encouraging shouts from loyal throats on either bank; Fort Donelson so surrendered to the silent-lipped Grant, February 16th, and its twelve thousand men and forty pieces of cannon so thoroughly taken up by him as to furnish no stopping-place for the tired party; Missouri, constipated under the empiric treatment of Van Dorn and Price, and evacuated under the drastic prescriptions of General Curtis, too weak to entertain the travellers; Pea Ridge, Arkansas, so shelled out by the Union pickers March 6, 7, and 8, 1862, that Ben McCullough and numerous rangers had gone into dead silences when called upon for help; New Madrid given up with six thousand butternut-colored troops to the constraining faith in the American Pope; Shiloh delivered in April to the armed Emanuel of Union expectations; Island Number Ten, in the Mississippi, with its seven thousand hosts and vast supplies, taken possession of April 7th, so as to afford no shelter to the equestrians; the restoration of all Kentucky and Tennessee back into the soft bands of the Union; the destruction of the Confederate flotilla in Albemarle Sound, and the taking of Roanoke Island, Forts Macon and Pulaski,—these unexpected incidents, as they advanced on the long trip, were rude shocks to the sight, the comfort, and the spirits of the hard-whistling equestrians. Whistle however they did and must, to keep up their courage