General Gillam deserves especial notice at the hands of the historian. All concurrent testimony represents him as most supercilious, insulting, and unfeeling. His headquarters in Lenoir, were at Mr. Albert Hagler's. The family were all crowded off into one room, while the gallant General and his staff appropriated all the rest of the premises, including kitchen and stables. To Miss Sarah Hagler, an accomplished young lady, he was especially impertinent, though she parried his attacks with the civility of a lady. On one occasion he said to her rudely, "I know you are a rebel from the way you move--an't you a rebel?" She replied, "General Gillam, did you ever hear the story of the tailor's wife and the scissors?" "Yes." "Then I am a rebel as high as I can reach." Coarseness, however, can not always be met playfully, and Mrs. Hagler incurred his anger to its fullest extent when, in reply to his violent denunciation of the Confederates for starving their prisoners, she ventured to suggest that the Federal authorities might have saved all this suffering had they agreed to exchange and take them North, where provisions were plenty. The General's reply to this was the giving his men tacit license to plunder and destroy the houses of Mrs. H.'s married daughter and niece, who lived very near her, and who, she had supposed, were to be protected, from his headquarters being at her house. No houses in the place suffered more severely than theirs. The house of her daughter, Mrs. Hartley, was pillaged from top to bottom. Barrels of sorghum were broken and poured over the wheat in the granary, and over the floors of the house. Furniture and crockery were smashed, and what was not broken up was defiled in a manner so disgusting as to be unfit for use. Mrs. Clark, the niece, was driven out of her house by the brutality of her plunderers. Her husband, Dr. Boone Clark, was a captain in the Confederate service, had been wounded in the battle of Leesburg, early in the war--an admirable and most graphic account of which engagement he wrote for the Raleigh _Standard_ soon after. In several subsequent battles he had received severe wounds, and though partially disabled by one of them at this time, he was endeavoring to raise a company of cavalry for home defense, as marauders, under the notorious Keith and Blalock, were constantly threatening to pillage Lenoir. These facts were known to some of Gillam's men, and they evidently enjoyed the opportunity to plunder his house and insult his defenseless wife. He himself was at home, sitting at table, when the raiders dashed in town. Seizing his gun, he ran out and secreted himself behind some adjoining buildings, and though a colonel did him the honor to enter his house almost immediately, and with a squad made a thorough search for him, his retreat remained undiscovered, and at night he left for more secure quarters. The raiders swarmed through the house that evening