swood,--there before the entrance is a conclave of officers,--then,
at last, entering, we stand in that most famous of Southern hotels, the
interior of which is filled with the very aroma of the Rebellion. A
thankful yielding up of carpet-bags and valises to the indignant negro
waiters, and then a brief moonlight stroll toward the capitol.

Within the gates of the Square, that swing on their hinges silent as the
hour we pass alone, before us stands the magnificent monument crowned
with Crawford's equestrian statue of Washington. The right hand of the
rider, lifted against the sky, points a prophetic finger toward the
southwest. Dark, and motionless, and grand, it is the one symbol
belonging solely to the Union, which they have not dared to desecrate;
which they have strangely chosen to consider neither as an insult nor a
rebuke.

Gazing beyond at the capitol itself, and back again at the figure which
overlooks the building, it is not hard to imagine that, while the noisy
debates of a congress of traitors to the Union that he founded were in
progress, those bronze lips sometimes smiled in scorn.

Leaving Richmond proper, and descending into the low, squalid portion of
the town known as Rocketts, one sees among the many large warehouses,
used without exception for the storage of tobacco, a certain one more
irregular than the rest. An archway leads into it, and upon the outside
of the second story windows runs a long ledge or footway, whereupon
sentries used to stride, guarding the miserable people within. This is
the jail of Castle Thunder, and it was the civil or State prison of the
capital. Ill as were the accommodations of prisoners of war, the
treatment of their own unoffending citizens by the Rebel government was
ten times more infamous. We could not repress indignation, nor by any
philosophic or charitable effort excuse the atrocious tyranny which here
lashed, chained, handcuffed, tortured, shot, and hung, hundreds of
people whom it could not stultify or impress. We may grant that the
Confederacy had become a government; that, in its perilous incipiency,
it had apology for severity and rigor with all malcontents; that, in its
own struggle for death or life, it might, in self-defence, absorb all
private liberty; but even thus the terrible testimony of this Castle
Thunder is an everlasting stigma upon the Southern cause. We entered its
strong portal, and there in the new commandant's room lay the record
left behind