e, and the fire, and
the right wing of Grant's army. I remember I was glad then that I had
moved the office down to the house, for we were out of the way there.
Everybody had run away from the Department; and so, when the powers that
be took possession, my little sub-bureau was unmolested for some days. I
improved those days as well as I could,--burning carefully what was to
be burned, and hiding carefully what was to be hidden. One thing that
happened then belongs to this story. As I was at work on the private
bureau,--it was really a bureau, as it happened, one I had made Aunt
Eunice give up when I broke my leg,--I came, to my horror, on a neat
parcel of coast-survey maps of Georgia, Alabama, and Florida. They were
not the same Maury stole when he left the National Observatory, but they
were like them. Now I was perfectly sure that on that fatal Sunday of
the flight I had sent Lafarge for these, that the President might use
them, if necessary, in his escape. When I found them, I hopped out and
called for Julia, and asked her if she did not remember his coming for
them. "Certainly," she said, "it was the first I knew of the danger.
Lafarge came, asked for the key of the office, told me all was up,
walked in, and in a moment was gone."

And here, on the file of April 3d, was Lafarge's line to me:--

"I got the secret-service parcel myself, and have put it in the
President's own hands. I marked it, 'Gulf coast,' as you bade me."

What could Lafarge have given to the President? Not the soundings of
Hatteras Bar. Not the working-drawings of the first monitor. I had all
these under my hand. Could it be,--"Julia, what did we do with that
stuff of Sarah's that she marked _secret service?_"

As I live, we had sent the girls' old hoops to the President in his
flight.

And when the next day we read how he used them, and how Pritchard
arrested him, we thought if he had only had the right parcel he would
have found the way to Florida.

That is really the end of this memoir. But I should not have written it,
but for something that happened just now on the piazza. You must know,
some of us wrecks are up here at the Berkeley baths. My uncle has a
place near here. Here came to-day John Sisson, whom I have not seen
since Memminger ran and took the clerks with him. Here we had before,
both the Richards brothers, the great paper men, you know, who started
the Edgerly Works in Prince George's County, just after the war began.
After