On the 24th of March, the Silent Man issued an order for a centripetal movement on Richmond. Lee, in every way tried to break the converging fate. Along the Appomattox River, at Fort Stedman, and at every weak-looking place, he hurled himself against the links of a chain, now slowly drawing around him; but all to no purpose. On the 2d of April Grant broke through Lee’s intrenched lines about Petersburg; and Lee at once disturbed J. Davis, although at church in Richmond, by a sudden notice that Petersburg and Richmond were insecure places, and that he must flee to other refuges, than his old ones. Neither sitting nor lying would now do; and accordingly the head of the Confederacy took to his feet, and fled with the few depraved treasures which had not gone already to corruption. Hurrying through Richmond, he got away as fast as a very un-express train would carry him, over railroads hacked by Sheridan, Stoneman, and Grierson. The next morning General Weitzel entered the capital of the dissolving Confederacy—so long held by brave men—with a body of colored troops,—representatives of that fate which four years before had been ignorantly invoked, and now rapidly fulfilling,—representatives, too, of those one hundred and eighty thousand others, with skins colored like their own, who had given themselves to the service of a Union, whose stripes they had often felt, and whose stars for them had just peeped above the eastern hills and were beginning to sing for joy. Lee at once commenced a retreat towards the Southwest, hoping to unite his broken forces with Johnston, who, however, was too actively taken up by Sherman to reciprocate his intentions. At Amelia Court-House Sheridan and his centaurs suddenly appeared before the astonished Confederates on the 6th of April, and cut seven thousand away from them. The remainder General Lee dragged forward to Appomattox Court-House, and there delivered them over to the generous justice of his brother-in-arms, the silent-lipped, whose magnanimity was a fit type of the large forbearance of a country, which, wronged by a causeless war,—generated for ends that in other lands would have brought its authors to the place where all ropes terminate,—has to look back on no crosses, but for itself. A really fine character, a great strategist, and personally brave man, the chief of the Confederate Army, who had delivered such “bloody instructions” to the fathers, became the head of a college, and deals out, it is to be hoped, better lessons to the sons.