It must be admitted that in the first stages of the war the weight of feminine enthusiasm was in the Southern scale. There was good reason for this. At the first call of battle, the South sent forth her best and bravest, her own most cherished sons, while the North responded more tardily, leaving much of its work in the hands of substitutes of the lower class and of mercenaries. The foreigners who had of late come to our shores in such numbers had settled in the North and Northwest; and they naturally fought rather from necessity and wish for bounty than from patriotism. The flame was as steady in the North, but it was not so vivid; it had not yet been blown to full fervor. Moreover, in the North the full gravity of the task undertaken was still less recognized than in the South. When McDowell marched upon Johnston and Beauregard at Bull Run, carriages full of the leaders of Washington society, women as well as men, came to make gay his camp and see the total discomfiture of the enemy; and the flight back to the capital which followed his defeat included many women of the upper circles, whose terrors and sufferings were not undeserved as results of the extremes into which their enthusiasm had misled them. This was a poor expression indeed of the patriotism which glowed in the female breast of that day; but the time produced a better specimen and showed how the feeling found true as well as false vent. It was a young girl who brought to Beauregard the first intelligence of McDowell's movement upon Manassas and enabled him to give Johnston the warning which led to the timely juncture of their forces and the result of the battle. The young lady had heard some officers of the Union army discussing the projected movement while at the table of her father in his house near Washington. Delicately nurtured and reared as she had been, with her own hands she saddled her horse and rode through the night, partly through camps of coarsely jesting soldiery, partly along hardly-marked roads, amid darkness and in loneliness, that she might serve the land she loved. It was the first of many such services that were to be done by the women of the South, who alone had opportunity to render them, or they had surely found many rivals.