, each line invaluable. When peace
has restored the ravages of war, and our nation's grandeur has made
this struggle the most memorable of those great conflicts by which
ideas are rooted into society, these pen-pictures of the humblest
events, the merest routine details of the life led in winning national
unity and freedom, will be priceless. Not for the historian's sake
alone, do I say, keep those letters, but for your sakes who receive
them, and ours who write them. The next skirmish may stop our pulses
forever, and our letters, full of love for you, will be our only
legacy besides that of having died in a noble cause. And should we
survive the war, with health and limb uninjured, or bowed with
sickness or crippled with wounds, those letters will be dear mementoes
to us of dangers past, of trials borne, of privations suffered, of
comrades beloved. Keep our letters, then, and write to us all the home
news and "gossip." Bid us Godspeed. Speak kindly, loving, courageous
words to us. If you can't be Spartans--and we don't want you to be--be
"lovers, countrymen, and friends." So shall our feet fall lighter, and
our sabers heavier!

PROPOSITION TO HANG THE DUTCH SOLDIERS.

The following specimen of "chivalric" literature is copied from the
Knoxville _Register_, of June 12, 1862:

Of late, in all battles and in all recent incursions made by Federal
cavalry, we have found the great mass of Northern soldiers to consist
of Dutchmen. The plundering thieves captured by Forrest, who stole
half the jewelry and watches in a dozen counties of Alabama, were
immaculate Dutchmen. The national odor of Dutchmen, as distinctive of
the race as that which, constantly ascending to heaven, has distended
the nostrils of the negro, is as unmistakable as that peculiar to a
polecat, an old pipe, or a lager-beer saloon. Crimes, thefts, and
insults to the women of the South invariably mark the course of these
stinking bodies of _sour-krout_. Rosecrans himself is an unmixed
Dutchman, an accursed race which has overrun the vast districts of
the country of the North-west.... It happens that we entertain a
greater degree of respect for an Ethiopian in the ranks of the
Northern armies, than for an odoriferous Dutchman, who can have no
possible interest in this revolution.

Why not hang every Dutchman captured? We will, hereafter, hang, shoot,
or imprison for life all white men taken in the command of negroes,
and enslave the negroes themselves. Th