val. "Now while you're reading, captain, suppose you read
about that big battle. Let's hear just how bad our fifteen thousand
whipped the Yankee thirty-five thousand."

The officer complied and read an account of the battle of Bull Run,
which was so highly sensational and so utterly unreasonable, that Rodney
Gray's common sense would not let him believe, more than half of it. He
hoped and believed that the Southern soldiers had gained a glorious
victory over the Lincoln hirelings; but that there could have been so
great a difference in the size of the contending armies, did not look
reasonable. But the captain put implicit faith in the story.

"It seems that the Federal success in the beginning of the fight was
owing to their overwhelming numbers," said he. "But the men on our side
were gentlemen who could not be driven by a rabble, and of course they
were bound to win in the end. But here is an article that may be of more
interest to us. It is entitled. 'The Situation in Missouri.' You know
that Governor Jackson went to Jefferson City and issued a proclamation
calling the people to arms, and that Lyon came up the river on
steamboats and routed him from there and from Booneville, too. You know
all about it, because you were there and so was I. Well, the Northern
papers think that that was a blow that secured Missouri to the Union,
and that thousands, who have been hesitating which side to take, will
now enlist to put down the rebellion. _Rebellion!_ Remember the word.
That's what the Lincoln hirelings call the efforts of a free people to
maintain their freedom. But listen to what the _Register_ has to say on
this point:

"The Northern soldiers prefer enlisting to starvation. But they are not
soldiers, least of all to meet the hot-blooded, thorough-bred, impetuous
men of the South. They are trencher-soldiers who enlisted to make war
upon rations, not upon men. They are such as marched through Baltimore,
squalid, wretched, ragged, half-naked, as the newspapers of that city
report them; fellows who do not know the breech of a musket from its
muzzle; white slaves, peddling watches; small-change knaves and
vagrants. These are the levied forces which Lincoln arrays as candidates
for the honor of being slaughtered by gentlemen such as Mobile sends to
battle. Let them come South and we will put our negroes to the dirty
work of killing them. But they will not come South. Not a wretch of them
will live on this side of the borde