The history of our personal privations, our household expenses, our public donations, and our taxes, will be a curious study of domestic and political economy combined. People who before the war had lived up fully to incomes of two thousand dollars a year, were reduced to less than one tenth of that sum, and are fully qualified now to give an answer to the question of how little one can live on. Fifty dollars in gold would have been gladly taken in exchange for many a whole year's salary in Confederate currency for the last year or two. Even now it is an inexplicable mystery to me how people with moderate salaries lived who had families to feed and clothe. It was done only by confining themselves strictly to the most common and coarsest articles, and by an entire renunciation of all the luxuries and most of the comforts of life. When tallow was thirty dollars per pound, people necessarily sat in darkness. I have walked from end to end of our town at night and not observed half a dozen lights. If we did not realize Charles Lamb's notion of society, as it must have existed before the invention of lights, when people had to feel about for a smile, and handle a neighbor's cheek to be sure that he understood a joke, it was because lightwood-knots were plentiful, and turpentine easy of access. The condition of the press was a striking commentary on the state of things among us. Some pains have been taken to secure an accurate list of our State papers from an entirely reliable source. At the commencement of the war there were but two daily papers in the State; at the close, there were four in the city of Raleigh alone. Of fifty-seven papers in existence in May, 1861, twenty-six ceased during the war. There are thirty-three now in the State, of which ten are dailies. People who had never taken more than their own county weekly in all their lives, found the Richmond dailies a necessity during the war, so great was the general anxiety to have the latest news, and above all from the army. The post-offices were besieged for the dingy half-sheets that came freighted with momentous intelligence for us. The _Fayetteville Observer_ and the _North-Carolina Presbyterian_ were the only two papers in the State whose dimensions were not reduced to a half-sheet. The _Fayetteville Observer_ had been for forty years one of the most ably edited, most sterling, and most influential journals in the State, and I may add, in the whole Southern country.[19] Its influence for good all through that long period can hardly be overrated. The editor, E.J. Hale, was an old-line whig in politics--a conservative of the strictest sort. His paper ranged side by side with the _National Intelligencer_, the _Richmond Whig_, and the other noble old journals of that school which had stood as breakwaters for more than a generation against the incoming tide of radicalism North and South, but were swept away at last in the great flood. Mr.