barren for human
ingenuity to garnish them with anxious artillery. All along were the
deep funnel-shaped cases of the torpedoes just disentombed. But at
nightfall Drury's Bluff flitted by like the battlemented wall of a city,
and then we saw no more.

The band that greeted us from a distance stops playing as the boat nears
the wharf.

There is a stillness, in the midst of which Richmond, with her ruins,
her spectral roof, afar, and her unchanging spires, rests beneath a
ghastly, fitful glare,--the night stain which a great conflagration
leaves behind it for weeks,--struggling silently with colossal shadows
along the foreground, two hideous walls alone arise in front, shutting
these gleams. They are the Libby Prison and Castle Thunder. Right and
left, and far in the moonlighted perspective beyond, there is a soft
glitter upon cornices and domes. A haggard glow of candles, faintly
defines the thoroughfares that have not suffered ruin; while massive,
and upon a height overlooking all, stands the Capitol, flying its black
shadow from the sinking moon across a hundred crumbling walls, until its
edges touch the windows of the Libby.

But over its massive roof, dimly seen through the mists of the river,
and, as before, "through the mists of the deep," the banner of the
Union, banished for four years, is shaken out again, broad and
beautiful, by the breath of an April night. Upon the face of every
leaning figure on the steamer's deck, in sight of that radiant signal,
is the same half-melancholy, half-triumphant smile.

The thought of the battle which has passed, of the army, which, after
struggling through years for this majestic procession, has swept by and
beyond without the view for which its straining eyes have yearned, is
sad and strange. There comes back dimly suggestive, a story of Iran and
his host, thundering at the gates of Tupelo, for the possession of a
wondrous jewel, and awakening once upon a dawn to learn that Tupelo was
an empty casket,--to turn back longing, "wondering eyes upon the city,
and to hunt the fleeing prize afar." Yet unto those legions of the
republic which have emptied Richmond of a prize which yet they may have
easily clutched, there go out reverence and blessing even larger than
might be bestowed upon them resting in camp, upon these overlooking
hills. That true allegiance, that calm and stern self-sacrifice which
impels an army forward past the sweet applauses and rewarding calms to
which g