Within the week of Frank's arrival, and when he was about setting out for the West, I was surprised one morning, by Ally's appearance in my office. Newbern had fallen, and he had made his way, with his mother, into the Union lines, and, after a good deal of difficulty, had secured a passage on a return transport to New York. I provided employment for his mother, but Ally insisted on going into the war with Frank. He went as his servant, but fought at his side at Lawrenceburgh, Dog Walk, Chaplin Hills, and Frankfort, and in three of those engagements was wounded. His bones now whiten the plains of Tennessee. Rosey he never saw, and never forgave. Frank was with the small body of regulars who, at Murfreesboro, on the 31st of December, checked the advance of Hardee's corps after McCook's division had been driven from the field, and who saved the day. He was wounded in the arm, early in the morning, but kept the field, and joined in that heroic movement wherein fifteen hundred men marched through an open field, and charged a body of ten thousand posted in a grove of cedars. Six hundred and forty-six of the brave band were left on the field. Frank was one of them. A Belgian ball pierced his side, and came out at his back. He saw and recognized the man who gave him the wound, and, raising himself on his elbow, fired a last shot. It did its work. The rebel lies buried where Frank fell. The telegram which informed me of this event, said: 'He is desperately wounded, but may survive.' He is now at home, slowly recovering. What he saw and did while serving in Kentucky and Tennessee, I may at some future time narrate to the reader. In relating actual events, a writer cannot in all cases visit artistic justice on each one of his characters; for, in real life, retribution does not always appear to follow crime. But, whatever _appearances_ may be, who is there that does not feel that virtue is ever its own reward, and vice its own punishment? and what one of my readers would exchange 'a quiet conscience, void of offence toward God and toward man,' for the princely fortune of John Hallet--who is still the great merchant, the 'exemplary citizen,' the 'honest man'? LAST WORDS. Whoever comes before the American people in a time of great _deeds_ like this, with mere _words_, should have no idle story to tell. He should have something to say; some fact to relate, or truth to communicate, which may awaken his countrymen to a true estimate of their interests, or a true sense of their duties. The writer of these articles _has_ something to say; some facts to relate which have not been told; some truths to communicate about Southern life and society, which the public ought to know. Some of these facts, gathered during sixteen years of intimate business and social intercourse with the planters and merchants of the South, he has endeavored to embody in this volume.