that some should have been left hanging so long that they were taken down dead. Coolly and deliberately these hardened men proceeded on their way, as if they had perpetrated no crime, and as if the God of heaven would not pursue them with his vengeance. But it was not alone the poor blacks (to whom they professed to come as liberators) that were thus subjected to torture and death. Gentlemen of high character, pure and honorable and gray-headed, unconnected with the military, were dragged from their fields or beds, and subjected to this process of threats, beating, and hanging. Along the whole track of Sherman's army traces remain of the cruelty and inhumanity practiced on the aged and the defenceless. Some of those who were hung up died under the rope, while their cruel murderers have not only been left unreproached and unhung, but have been hailed as heroes and patriots." OLD NORTH STATE'S TRIALS [Cornelia P. Spencer, in Last Ninety Days of the War, pages 95-97.] By January, 1865, there was very little room for "belief" of any sort in the ultimate success of the Confederacy. All the necessaries of life were scarce, and were held at fabulous and still increasing prices. The great freshet of January 10th, which washed low grounds, carried off fences, bridges, mills, and tore up railroads all through the central part of the State, at once doubled the price of corn and flour. Two destructive fires in the same months, which consumed great quantities of government stores at Charlotte and at Salisbury, added materially to the general gloom and depression. The very elements seemed to have enlisted against us. And soon, with no great surplus of food from the wants of her home population, North Carolina found herself called upon to furnish supplies for two armies. Early in January an urgent and most pressing appeal was made for Lee's army; and the people, most of whom knew not where they would get bread for their children in three months' time, responded nobly, as they had always done to any call for "the soldiers." Few were the hearts in any part of the land that did not thrill at the thought that those who were fighting for us were in want of food. From a humble cabin on the hill-side, where the old brown spinning-wheel and the rude loom were the only breastworks against starvation, up through all grades of life, there were none who did not feel a deep and tender, almost heartbreaking solicitude for our noble soldiers. For them the last barrel of flour was divided, the last luxury in homes that had once abounded cheerfully surrendered. Every available resource was taxed, every expedient of domestic economy was put into practice--as, indeed, had been done all along; but our people went to work even yet with fresh zeal. I speak now of central North Carolina, where many families of the highest respectability and refinement lived for months on corn-bread, sorghum, and peas; where meat was seldom seen on the