at nation; that courtesy bound all
grateful Virginian hearts to the common cause forever; the heyday and
gratulation were renewed; the new President, and the reverend senators
appeared on Richmond streets; the citizens were proud and happy.

There was no spectre of the mighty North, slowly rising from lethargy
like those Medicean figures of Michael Angelo, which leap from stone to
avengers. There was no mutter of coming storm, no clank of coming sabres
and bayonets, no creak of great wheels rolling southward, and war in its
extremest and most deadly phase. Richmond and Virginia laughed at these,
flushed in the present, and invincible in the past. They only held high
heads,--and trade, with vanity, grew strong, till every citizen wondered
why all this glory had been so long delayed, and despised the ten years
preceding the rupture, if not, indeed, the whole past of the Union.

The President of the United States proclaimed war; an army marched upon
the city. Not until the battle of Bull Run, when the dead and mangled
came by hundreds into the town, did any one discover the consequences of
Richmond's new distinction; but by this time the Rebel government had
absorbed Virginia, and was master of the city. Thenceforward Richmond
was the scene of all terrors, the prey of all fears and passions.
Campaign after campaign was directed against her; she lived in the
perpetual thunder of cannon; raiders pressed to her gates; she was a
great garrison and hospital only, besieged and cut off from her own
provinces; armies passed through her to the sound of drums, and returned
to the creak of ambulances. She lost her social prestige, and became a
barrack-city, filled with sutlers, adventurers, and refugees, till,
bearing bravely up amid domestic riot and horrible demoralization,--a
jail, a navy-yard, a base of operations,--she grew pinched, and base,
and haggard, and, at last, deserted. Given over to sack and fire, the
wretches who used her retreated in the night, and the enemies she had
provoked marched over her defences, and laid her--spent, degenerate, and
disgraced--under martial law.

The outline of the scenes immediately associated with the evacuation of
Richmond has been told by telegraph. Now that the stupefied citizens
have recovered reason and memory so well as to tell us the story, it
seems the most dramatic and fearful of the war. On Saturday the city was
calm and trusting; Lee, its idol, held Grant, at Petersburg, fast; th