r of the place had voluntarily taken the oath of
allegiance, and had made more money since the date of Federal occupation
than during his whole life previously. He said to me, curtly, that if by
any chance the Confederates should reoccupy Alexandria, he could very
well afford to relinquish his property. He employed a smart barkeeper,
who led guests by a retired way to the drinking-rooms. Here, with the
gas burning at a taper point, cobblers, cocktails, and juleps were mixed
stealthily and swallowed in the darkness. The bar was like a mint to the
proprietor; he only feared discovery and prohibition. It would not
accord with the chaste pages of this narrative to tell how some of the
noblest residences in Alexandria had been desecrated to licentious
purposes; nor how, by night, the parlors of cosey homes flamed with riot
and orgie. I stayed but a little time, having written an indiscreet
paragraph in the Washington Chronicle, for which I was pursued by the
War Department, and the management of my paper, lacking heart, I went
home in a pet.

CHAPTER VI.

DOWN THE CHESAPEAKE.

Disappointed in the unlucky termination of my adventures afield, I now
looked ambitiously toward New York. As London stands to the provinces,
so stands the empire city to America. Its journals circulate by hundreds
of thousands; its means are only rivalled by its enterprise; it is the
end of every young American's aspiration, and the New Bohemia for the
restless, the brilliant, and the industrious. It seemed a great way off
when I first beheld it, but I did not therefore despair. Small matters
of news that I gathered in my modest city, obtained space in the columns
of the great metropolitan journal, the----. After a time I was delegated
to travel in search of special incidents, and finally, when the noted
Tennessee Unionist, "Parson" Brownlow, journeyed eastward, I joined his
_suite_, and accompanied him to New York. The dream of many months now
came to be realized. A correspondent on the ----'s staff had been
derelict, and I was appointed to his division. His horse, saddle,
field-glasses, blankets, and pistols were to be transferred, and I was
to proceed without delay to Fortress Monroe, to keep with the advancing
columns of McClellan.

At six in the morning I embarked; at eleven I was whirled through my own
city, without a glimpse of my friends; at three o'clock I dismounted at
Baltimore, and at five was gliding down the Patapsco, under t