n church, where Lee, Davis,
Memminger, and the rest had been communicants, and heard Doctor
Minnegerode discourse. He was one of the Prussian refugees of 1848,
and, though a hot Jacobin there, became a more bitter secessionist here.
He is learned, fluent, and thoughtful, but speaks with a slight Teutonic
accent. Jeff Davis's pew was occupied by nobody, the door thereof being
shut. Jeff was a very devout man, but not so much so as Lee, who made
all the responses fervently, and knelt at every requirement. This church
is capable of "seating" fifteen hundred persons, has galleries running
entirely around it, and is sustained at the roof within by composite
pilasters of plaster, and at the pulpit by columns of mongrel
Corinthian; the _tout ensemble_ is very excellent; a darkey sexton gave
us a pew, and there were some handsome ladies present, dark Richmond
beauties, haughty and thinly clothed, with only here and there a
jockey-feathered hat, or a velvet mantilla, to tell of long siege and
privation. We saw that those who dressed the shabbiest had yet preserved
some little article of jewelry--a finger-ring, a brooch, a bracelet,
showing how the last thing in woman to die is her vanity. Poor, proud
souls! Last Sunday many of them were heiresses; now many of them could
not pay the expenses of their own funerals. There were some Confederate
officers in the house. They reminded me of the captive Jews holding
worship in their gutted Temple. Some ruffians broke into this church
after the occupation, and wrote ribaldry in the Bible and hymn-book. Dr.
Minnegerode dared not pray for the Confederate States, and his sermon
was trite, based upon the text of the eleventh chapter of the Acts--"The
disciples were first called Christians in Antioch." In the opening
lesson, however, he aimed poison at the North, selecting the
forty-fourth and following Psalms, commencing, "We have heard with our
ears, O God! our fathers have told us, what work Thou didst in their
days, in the times of old." Then it spoke of the heathen being driven
out and the chosen people planted; afflicted by God's disfavor, the
forefathers held the territory, and the generation extant would yet rout
its enemies. But now the old stock were put to shame, a reproach to
their neighbors and those that dwelt round about them. "Thou hast broken
us in the place of dragons, and covered us with the shadow of death,"
going not forth with our armies, bowing our souls to the dust till o