Yet while nature’s healings were already anointing the ragged wounds of incisive war, over other and wide districts came ills which almost defied the bungling surgeries and irregular apothecary appliances that were wasted upon or unwisely aggravated them. In these districts predatory bands hovered over and constantly lit upon disorganized and broken industries, as crows cawingly follow a disrupted herd of buffaloes or swoop upon the wounded which fall out of the straggling march. The harryings of cattle; the plunder of farmsteads, of bean-patches,—nursed by the patient labor of suddenly made widows,—and even of houses seemingly secure from their proximity to villages; wayside murders from concealed coverts; midnight shots at men asleep in bed, or treacherously called out on pretended errands of charity, and hewn down, frayed and fretted the lives of those who still clung to the Union throughout the Border States. There were daily tragedies, sadder than the tinselled shows of the stage. There were masqueraders who danced through desultory cruelties at which even the readers of novels, languid over ordinary stories, enkindle into activity and excitement, and family feuds encrimsoning their way into living sorrows and eventually into tales, which in mercy we call fictions. The winter and spring of 1864 pendulated with balanced successes and reverses to either combatant. In March, General Grant was made Commander-in-Chief, and immediately set on foot a plan to wake up the uneasy sleeper and free him from the nightmare. This plan was to start simultaneously, and to keep in motion, the various corps of the Federal army; Sherman’s one hundred thousand at Chattanooga against Johnston’s army in Georgia; Banks’s and Farragut’s in conjunction against Mobile; and Grant himself, united with Meade, against Lee and Richmond: thus shredding, at the same time, the still suspended cotton curtain, and preventing its busy stitchers at one point from assisting those making repairs at another. Meade crossed the Rapidan, May 4th, and advanced towards Richmond, giving Lee a very lively hunt through the Wilderness for a month, and at length driving him over the soupy and astonished Chickahominy. At the same time Grant, holding his spirited team well in hand, drove up also towards the Confederate capital, until he halted on the south side of the James. Soon after, in order to divert attention from that long-coveted spot, Richmond, General Jubal E. Early made into Maryland a raid, which he repeated in July, but from which he was sent whirling back into the Shenandoah valley. He renewed his experiments again in September and October, but was finally chased out by Sheridan and his centaurs, who seemed to mount the wind, and, on their rapid and supperless rides to live off condensed night air. Along the hyperborean lines rang the warning after the discomfited Confederate:—