Many suggestive incidents pertaining to them, some sad, some mirth-provoking, came under my eye. The contrabands usually trudged into the city in groups, bearing in their hands or on their shoulders budgets, filled with old clothing or useless traps, their heads covered with dilapidated hats or caps, or, in the case of the women, wrapped about with red bandanas. Their garments were coarse, often tattered, and usually quite insufficient to shield them against the cold of winter. They wore shoes and boots of cowhide which in very many cases were nearly worn out, so that often their black toes protruded. But one cold, frosty, winter day a motley company of fugitives, men, women and children, came marching in barefooted. We asked them how they came to be in such a wretched plight? They said that as they were going “long de road” out in the country, some “Confed sogers” seized them, set them on a bank by the roadside, and pulled off their shoes, and then told them just to run for their lives. Their unusual predicament, and the unanimity and heartiness of their artless testimony, convinced all who heard that they told the truth. It might have been horse-play on the part of some company of the State Guards, but if so, it was a grim and terrible joke to this knot of contrabands, compelling them to walk many miles with bare feet along frozen, snowy roads, the feet of the little children frost-bitten and bleeding. An occurrence vastly more pathetic was woven into my pastoral experience. A slaveholder of the cruel sort lived near Jefferson City. There belonged to him a little girl eight years old, together with her mother and aunt. The early winter of 1861 and 1862 was bitterly cold. During one of the severest days of that trying season, the thermometer hovering about zero, he compelled these two women to saw wood all day out in the open air, and the mite of a girl to bring the sawed sticks into his wood-shed. With hands stinging from the biting frost, they besought him to let them warm themselves by the fire; and he answered their petition with the lash. Before the day ended they nearly perished and the fingers of the child were frozen. That night they determined to run away. They knew that on account of the war many other slaves were quitting their masters; why should not they flee from the cruelty of theirs? In the darkness the following night they slipt away unobserved. They headed for St. Louis. The little child, always feeble, was soon exhausted. So the mother and aunt by turns carried her on their backs. They hid in ravines and thickets, when they thought themselves in danger. They ate the crackers and bread that they brought with them. They slept by haystacks and in outhouses. They were frost-bitten. They were full of fear lest the child should die. For seventy-five or eighty miles they breasted wind and snow, when they met a squad of Union soldiers, and asked them for protection and guidance. The soldiers as