FRIDAY, NOV. 20. A German complained to me this morning that one of the volunteers, a countryman of his, under Col. Fremont, had stolen from him a pair of valuable pistols. He strongly suspected the person who had taken them. I sent for him; he confessed the act, delivered up the pistols, and begged me, as this was his first offence, not to expose him. He was a youth of eighteen or so, slightly built, and with a fair and remarkably ingenuous countenance. I told him he must take heed, as one offence often paves the way to another; but as he was in the campaign, and might soon be on the field of peril and death, his error should rest in silence with his own conscience. The tears stood in his eyes. SATURDAY, NOV. 21. Capt. Foster, it appears, was not shot in the heat of the engagement on the river. He had rushed forward in advance to reconnoiter, and was suddenly surrounded from an ambush, and fell, bravely fighting to the last. A Delaware Indian, who was hastening to his rescue, finding himself hotpressed, jumped from his horse behind a tree, from which he shot three of his antagonists, and then effected his escape. His living breastwork now shows in its scathed rind, how well it served him. It looks as if the auger-worm had bored there for an age. There is something about a tree, with an Indian behind it, armed with a rifle, pointing this way and that, which awkwardly tests a man’s nerves. You seem to be shooting at the muzzle of his rifle instead of him; and that is not the worst of it, he is all the while shooting at you. If partial concealment lends a charm to beauty, it also lends terror to an Indian. We think of the brake as much as the serpent coiled in its shadows. Were lightning to fall without thunder, people would put conductors on their bean-poles; and yet the blazing bolt strikes and shivers while the lagging thunder is yet unheard. SUNDAY, NOV. 22. As soon as it will be prudent to withdraw our men from their posts on the Sabbath, I intend to propose a religious service. We shall soon be able to gather fifty or more. Every house here has a ball-room where the gay may dance, and a Madonna to whom the afflicted may kneel; but none have a chapel; and if they had, the forms of Protestant worship would be held a profanation. There is only one way to get to heaven here, and that is through the absolving power of the Papal See. Every other path leads to purgatorial pangs and penal fire.