light I had sent Lafarge for these, that the President might use
them, if necessary, in his escape. When I found them, I hopped out and
called for Julia, and asked her if she did not remember his coming for
them. "Certainly," she said, "it was the first I knew of the danger.
Lafarge came, asked for the key of the office, told me all was up,
walked in, and in a moment was gone."

And here, on the file of April 3d, was Lafarge's line to me:--

"I got the secret-service parcel myself, and have put it in the
President's own hands. I marked it, 'Gulf coast,' as you bade me."

What could Lafarge have given to the President? Not the soundings of
Hatteras Bar. Not the working-drawings of the first monitor. I had all
these under my hand. Could it be,--"Julia, what did we do with that
stuff of Sarah's that she marked _secret service_?"

As I live, we had sent the girls' old hoops to the President in his
flight.

And when the next day we read how he used them, and how Pritchard
arrested him, we thought if he had only had the right parcel he would
have found the way to Florida.

That is really the end of this memoir. But I should not have written it,
but for something that happened just now on the piazza. You must know,
some of us wrecks are up here at the Berkeley baths. My uncle has a
place near here. Here came to-day John Sisson, whom I have not seen
since Memminger ran and took the clerks with him. Here we had before,
both the Richards brothers, the great paper men, you know, who started
the Edgerly Works in Prince George's County, just after the war began.
After dinner, Sisson and they met on the piazza. Queerly enough, they
had never seen each other before, though they had used reams of
Richards's paper in correspondence with each other, and the treasury had
used tons of it in the printing of bonds and bank-bills. Of course we
all fell to talking of old times,--old they seem now, though it is not a
year ago. "Richards," said Sisson at last, "what became of that last
order of ours for water-lined, pure linen government-callendered paper
of _surete_? We never got it, and I never knew why."

"Did you think Kilpatrick got it?" said Richards, rather gruffly.

"None of your chaff, Richards. Just tell where the paper went, for in
the loss of that lot of paper, as it proved, the bottom dropped out of
the Treasury tub. On that paper was to have been printed our new issue
of ten per cent, convertible, you know, and secured on t