for the last week before we got her into port.

Now think of the ingratitude of men! I have brought her in here,
"according to my best discretion," and do you believe, these hidalgos,
or dons, or senores, or whatever they are, had forgotten she existed.
And when I showed them to her, they said in good Portugal that I was a
liar. Fortunately the Consul is our old friend Kingsley. He was
delighted to see me; thought I was at the bottom of the sea. From him we
learned that the Confederacy was blown sky-high long ago. And from all I
can learn, I may have the Florida back again for my own private yacht or
peculium, unless she goes to Sta. Lucia.

Not I, my friends! Scrape her, and mend her, and give her to the
marines,--and tell them her story; but do not intrust her again to my
own Polly's own

FREDERIC INGHAM.

THE SKELETON IN THE CLOSET.

BY J. THOMAS DARRAGH (LATE C. C. S.).

[This paper was first published in the "Galaxy," in 1866.]

I see that an old chum of mine is publishing bits of confidential
Confederate History in Harper's Magazine. It would seem to be time,
then, for the pivots to be disclosed on which some of the wheelwork of
the last six years has been moving. The science of history, as I
understand it, depends on the timely disclosure of such pivots, which
are apt to be kept out of view while things are moving.

I was in the Civil Service at Richmond. Why I was there, or what I did,
is nobody's affair. And I do not in this paper propose to tell how it
happened that I was in New York in October, 1864, on confidential
business. Enough that I was there, and that it was honest business. That
business done, as far as it could be with the resources intrusted to me,
I prepared to return home. And thereby hangs this tale, and, as it
proved, the fate of the Confederacy.

For, of course, I wanted to take presents home to my family. Very little
question was there what these presents should be,--for I had no boys nor
brothers. The women of the Confederacy had one want, which overtopped
all others. They could make coffee out of beans; pins they had from
Columbus; straw hats they braided quite well with their own fair hands;
snuff we could get better than you could in "the old concern." But we
had no hoop-skirts,--skeletons, we used to call them. No ingenuity had
made them. No bounties had forced them. The Bat, the Greyhound, the
Deer, the Flora, the J. C. Cobb, the Varuna, and the Fore-and-Aft all