s Capture.--Another Hard
Chase.--Failure to enter Charleston.--Return to Nassau.

Another, and a longer cruise, was then contemplated, and there was some
prospect of prevailing with the Secretary of the Navy to fit out the
ship for a cruiser, by giving her proper spars, providing the means of
disconnecting the screws, and furnishing quarters for officers and men.
But disasters to our arms were then following fast upon each other.
General Sherman, after marching unopposed from Atlanta to the sea, and
capturing Savannah, was preparing to continue his progress. Wilmington
was threatened by a powerful sea and land force. The half starved and
ill clad army of Northern Virginia was in the trenches around
Petersburg, and the now contracting area of country available for
supplies, had been so thoroughly drained, that it became a vital
question how to provision the troops.

I was summoned again, and for the last time during the war, to Richmond.
It was in the early part of December. There now remained to the
Confederacy only the single line of rail communication from Wilmington,
via Greensborough, and Danville, to Richmond. The progress of
demoralization was too evident at every step of my journey, and nowhere
were the poverty, and the straits to which the country was reduced, more
palpably visible, than in the rickety, windowless, filthy cars,
traveling six or eight miles an hour, over the worn out rails and
decaying road-bed. We were eighteen hours in making the distance (about
one hundred and twenty miles) from Danville to Richmond. As we passed in
the rear of General Lee's lines, and I saw the scare-crow cattle there
being slaughtered for the troops, the game seemed to be at last growing
desperate. We were detained for perhaps an hour at the station where the
cattle were being slaughtered. Several soldiers who were on the train,
left us there; and as soon as they alighted from the cars, they seized
portions of the offal, kindled a fire, charred the scraps upon the
points of their ramrods, and devoured the unclean food with the avidity
of famished tigers.

It was arranged in Richmond, that I should take command of the
"Tallahassee," and proceed with all dispatch to Bermuda for a cargo of
provisions; my late experience with the Governor of the island rendering
it quite probable that he would prevent the Chickamauga from even
discharging her cargo as a merchant vessel. That steamer (the
Tallahassee,) of so many aliase