Smothered rumbling noises started the listening ear, as ever and anon some huge edifice or wing of a building fell. The head of the house was away with the troops, and his wife was ill and alone with her servants, but the sudden visit of so many strangers was no check to the hospitality of the hostess. Every sofa and available substitute was brought into requisition, and all rendered comfortable. Sleep was banished from all eyes, even had any been inclined to repose. The clanking, clattering noise of several hundred disorderly cavalrymen around the house kept every one awake, while all felt the desolate weariness of the night to be but a harbinger of the coming day. “What must have been the feelings of the occupants of that house that summer night, we of the present day cannot realize,” writes an eminent historian in 1842; but those who had not “fallen asleep” when the summer of 1862 came upon us, endured similar hours of anguish, which seared their hearts forever. No scene of horror was enacted in or about Washington in that week of excitement that was not repeatedly paralleled in the sad years of our civil war. Long before day, the sleepless caravan, with Mrs. Madison at the head, started forward to the place appointed for a meeting with Mr. Madison. Consternation was at its uttermost: the whole region filled with frightened people, terrified scouts roaming about and spreading alarm that the enemy were coming from Washington and Alexandria, and that there was safety nowhere. As the day wore on, in which the British were plundering and burning Washington, the storm that sent terror to their superstitious bosoms overtook the tired refugees. But the elemental war, with its bolts of thunder and zigzag lightning penetrating the darkened recesses of the forest, caused no feeling so insupportable as the flying rumor that the negroes were in revolt, and maddened with drink and promised liberty, were roaming in numbers, committing every excess, worse than those at Hampton the year before. As the day gradually drew to a close, the faint and drenched companions of Mrs. Madison reached the appointed place, sixteen miles from Washington. But the President was not there, and here occurred one of those disagreeable scenes that are a disgrace to the name of humanity, and which, be it said to the shame of her sex, are oftener the acts of woman than of man. Crowds of persons from Washington occupied the tavern, and the women declared that the wife of him who had brought war upon the country, should not find shelter with them, its innocent victims. Jaded and exhausted from constant travel and want of sleep, the devoted band about Mrs. Madison waited in the rain, urging the tavern-keeper to give them an apartment until the President should arrive. The furious storm grew louder, the sky, lowering before, was black as night now, and a tornado of tropical fury set in which spread desolation for many miles around. Women who had