na, I really
suffered from the heat.

At 10 A.M. I called on General Cooper, Adjutant-General to the
Confederate forces, and senior general in the army. He is brother-in-law
to Mr Mason, the Southern Commissioner in London. I then called upon Mr
Benjamin, the Secretary of State, who made an appointment with me to
meet him at his house at 7 P.M. The public offices are handsome stone
buildings, and seemed to be well arranged for business. I found at least
as much difficulty in gaining access to the great men as there would be
in European countries; but when once admitted, I was treated with the
greatest courtesy. The anterooms were crowded with people patiently
waiting for an audience.

The streets of Richmond are named and numbered in a most puzzling
manner, and the greater part of the houses are not numbered at all. It
is the most hilly city I have seen in America, and its population is
unnaturally swollen since the commencement of the war. The fact of there
being abundance of ice appeared to me an immense luxury, as I had never
seen any before in the South; but it seems that the winters are quite
severe in Northern Virginia.

I was sorry to hear in the highest quarters the gloomiest forebodings
with regard to the fate of Vicksburg. This fortress is in fact _given
up_, and all now despair of General Johnston's being able to effect
anything towards its relief.

I kept my appointment with Mr Benjamin at 7 o'clock. He is a stout
dapper little man, evidently of Hebrew extraction, and of undoubted
talent. He is a Louisianian, and was senator for that state in the old
United States Congress, and I believe he is accounted a very clever
lawyer and a brilliant orator. He told me that he had filled the onerous
post of Secretary of War during the first seven months of the Secession,
and I can easily believe that he found it no sinecure. We conversed for
a long time about the origin of secession, which he indignantly denied
was brought about, as the Yankees assert, by the interested machinations
of individuals. He declared that, for the last ten years, the Southern
statesmen had openly stated in Congress what would take place; but the
Northerners never would believe they were in earnest, and had often
replied by the taunt, "The South was so bound to, and dependent on, the
North, that _she couldn't be kicked out of the Union_."

He said that the Southern armies had always been immensely outnumbered
in all their battles, and th