islature a message, yesterday, rebuking the
members for doing so little, and urging the passage of a bill putting
into the State service all between the ages of sixteen and eighteen and
over forty-five. The Legislature considered his lecture an insult, and
the House of Delegates contemptuously laid it on the table by an almost
unanimous vote. So he has war with the Legislature, while the President
is in conflict with the Confederate States Senate.

JANUARY 28TH.--The beautiful, pleasant weather continues.

It is said Congress passed, last night, in secret session, the bill
allowing increased compensation to civil officers and employees. Mr.
Davidson, of fifty years of age, resigned, to-day, his clerkship in the
War Department, having been offered $5000 by one of the incorporated
companies to travel and buy supplies for it.

Mr. Hubbard, of Alabama, suggests to the Secretary to buy 500,000
slaves, and give one to every soldier enlisting from beyond our present
lines, at the end of the war. He thinks many from the border free States
would enlist on our side. The Secretary does not favor the project.

Gen. Whiting writes for an order for two locomotive boilers, at
Montgomery, Ala., for his torpedo-boats, now nearly completed. He says
he intends to attack the blockading squadron off Wilmington.

The weather is still warm and beautiful. The buds are swelling.

JANUARY 30TH.--The Senate has passed a new Conscription Act, putting all
residents between the ages of eighteen and fifty-five in the military
service for the war. Those over forty-five to be detailed by the
President as commissary quartermasters, Nitre Bureau agents, provost
guards, clerks, etc. This would make up the enormous number of 1,500,000
men! The express companies are to have no detail of men fit for the
field, but the President may exempt a certain class for agricultural
purposes, which, of course, can be revoked whenever a farmer refuses to
sell at schedule prices, or engages in speculation or extortion. Thus
the President becomes almost absolute, and the Confederacy a military
nation. The House will pass it with some modifications. Already the
_Examiner_ denounces it, for it allows only one owner or editor to a
paper, and just sufficient printers,--no assistant editors, no
reporters, no clerks, etc. This will save us, and hasten a peace.

Mr. G. A. Myers, the little old lawyer, always potential with the
successive Secretaries of War, proposes, in a l