re evidently there for some purpose looking to the success of the
rebellion. Thomlinson received them kindly, inquired of Winter-green
how he felt since his return from London, and asked many questions about
certain people at Windsor. Henry was also interrogated as to how matters
looked to him, to which he answered that the signs were not so favorable
as heretofore.

"Thomlinson went into a long disquisition on the recent campaigns. He
denounced Gen. Head, who had been so utterly destroyed by Papson, as a
'brainless ass,' and spoke of Gen. Laws as having lost much of his
vigor and daring. He said that if Gen. Wall, their greatest General, was
alive, he would drive Silent out of Virginia in one month. He said that
the re-election of Lincoln was a severe blow to them; that they had been
deceived by their Northern friends. They had been led to believe that
there was no doubt of Little Mac's election, with a liberal expenditure
of money; that he had drawn checks and paid out for that purpose on
behalf of the Confederacy $1,100,000, and seemed to think that unless
measures were taken at once to strike consternation into the hearts
of the Northern people all would be lost; that the President of the
Confederacy and his Cabinet had been all along expecting some great
result from the efforts of their Northern allies, and especially from
the efforts of Valamburg and Thomas A. Strider.

"'True,' he said, 'Valamburg had been very much hampered by the
suspicions resting upon him in the minds of the people, but it was not
so with Strider. He could have done a great deal more if he had not been
so timid. He (Strider) seemed to think that he could secure the success
of the Confederacy by crippling the U. S. Government in opposing
legislation and breeding strife and jealousies in the Union armies.
'But,' he continued, 'Lincoln is an old fox, and soon smelled out those
little devices of Strider. He has completely checkmated him and his
friends who were acting on his line, by relieving from command all those
who were playing into Stridor's hands, and has put in their places a set
of fanatics, who are fighting on moral grounds alone.'

"He spoke of Silent as a man who did not value life or anything else,
saying that he was a superstitious man, who believed that he was merely
an instrument in the hands of the Almighty to wipe out slavery. Not only
so, but believed that he was guided and directed in all his movements by
the mysterious hand