If the Legislature of Virginia convened at Richmond on the twenty-ninth of March, 1865, small time was allowed for their deliberations; and it would have been of very little practical utility if the General Assembly of North-Carolina had been summoned to correspond with it at that date. On the second of April, Richmond was evacuated. Our President and his cabinet were fugitives in the clear starlight of that woful night; our capital was delivered over to a mob, and in flames. But we did not even dream of it. It was more than a week before the certain intelligence was received in Central Carolina, and even then many doubted. Dismal rumors from Lee's army, of the fall of Petersburg, of the fate of Richmond, were whispered, but were contradicted every hour by those whose wish was father to the thought that there was hope yet, that all was not lost. We were indeed in the very turning-point and fatal crisis of the great _Southern States rights struggle_; but we hardly realized through what an era of history we were living. In the quiet and secluded village in which I now write, the uninterrupted order of our daily life afforded a strong confirmation of the great English historian's saying, that in all wars, after all, but a comparatively small portion of a nation are actually engaged or affected. The children plan their little fishing-parties, the plow-boy whistles in the field, the wedding-supper is provided, and the daily course of external domestic life in general flows as smoothly as ever, except immediately in the track of the armies. It is not indifference nor insensibility. It is the wise and beneficent order of Providence that it should be with the body politic as with our physical frame. One part may suffer mutilation, and though a sympathetic thrill of anguish pervade every nerve of the whole body, yet the natural functions are not suspended in any other member. Men must lie down, and sleep, and eat, and go through the ordinary routine of daily duty in circumstances of the most tragic interest. It is only on the stage that they tear their hair and lie prostrate on the ground. So we still exchanged our Confederate money with each other--the bright, new, clean twenties and tens, which we tried to believe were worth something, for there was still a faint magical aroma of value hovering round those promises to pay "six months after a treaty of peace with the United States;" $25 a yard for country jeans, $30 a yard for calico, $10 for a pair of cotton socks, $20 for a wheat-straw hat, $25 for a bushel of meal, and $10 to have a tooth pulled, and very cheap at that--if we had only known all. Mothers were still preparing boxes for their boys in the army; the farmer got his old battered tools in readiness for his spring's work; the merchant went daily to preside over the scanty store of thread, needles, and buttons, remnants of calico, and piles of homespun, which now constituted his stock in trade; and our little