The difficulties in the way of procuring provision can hardly be imagined by any but those who lived through that time. One of the last resorts was to smuggle cotton to the Chowan country in exchange for bacon, pound for pound. The greatest irregularities, of course, prevailed in different parts of the South. In some of the central counties of the Gulf States provisions were almost a drug in the market, (there being no transportation,) while here and in the army we were starving. One of the last desperate expedients of our Government, and which bore as hardly on our people as any other, was the calling out of men between the ages of forty-five and fifty, and the Junior Reserves, mere children who should have been at home with their mothers. When the heads of families were taken away, often leaving a houseful of girls only to assist the mother to make bread, the distress and trouble were most piteous. At first the Government was inclined to be liberal in exemptions, but in the last ninety days all were taken. On some counties of our State there was a disposition to resist or evade this wholesale conscription, and there were in consequence many deserters, many of whom lived by plundering their neighbors, and thus added to the general confusion and anxiety and peril of the times. Many acts of violence were committed in certain localities. Their expedients to escape capture, the modes of living they resorted to, the singular hiding-places they improvised or elaborated, would make an amusing and curious chapter in the history of the war--only these are the points which historians who desire to represent a people as unanimous in a great national struggle for rights and liberty do not generally care to present. If any of the immortal three hundred faltered on the way to Thermopylæ we have never been told of it. I know that we were greatly mortified to hear the stories that were told by those who were sent in search of our recreants. It was a severe shock to our high-strung theories of Southern chivalry and patriotism, to think of Southerners hiding in dens and caves of the earth, resolved with great constancy NOT to be martyrs, having to be unearthed in these burrows and dragged out to the fight. One warrior lived for weeks in a hollow tree, fed by his wife; another was conscripted from beneath his own hen-house, where he had dug out a sort of grave, into which, well supplied with blankets, he descended in peace every morning. One took possession of an old, deserted, and forgotten mine in his neighborhood, and by a skillful disposal of brush and rubbish at the entrance, kept house quite comfortably for months, plying his trade of shoemaker meanwhile, and supplied with food from home. The women, in such cases, were the instigators of the skulking. One soldier returning to his regiment, after a furlough at home in a certain county, said "He'd be d----d if Jeff Davis wouldn't desert too if he were to stay at ---- awhile."