had suffered so terrible a loss in life and _morale_ that
he was in no condition for effective pursuit. As at Spring Hill, daybreak
found us on the road with all our impedimenta except some of our wounded,
and that night we encamped under the protecting guns of Thomas, at
Nashville. Our gallant enemy audaciously followed, and fortified himself
within rifle-reach, where he remained for two weeks without firing a gun
and was then destroyed.

'WAY DOWN IN ALABAM'

At the break-up of the great Rebellion I found myself at Selma, Alabama,
still in the service of the United States, and although my duties were now
purely civil my treatment was not uniformly so, and I am not surprised
that it was not. I was a minor official in the Treasury Department,
engaged in performance of duties exceedingly disagreeable not only to the
people of the vicinity, but to myself as well. They consisted in the
collection and custody of "captured and abandoned property." The Treasury
had covered pretty nearly the entire area of "the States lately in
rebellion" with a hierarchy of officials, consisting, as nearly as memory
serves, of one supervising agent and a multitude of special agents. Each
special agent held dominion over a collection district and was allowed an
"agency aide" to assist him in his purposeful activity, besides such
clerks, laborers and so forth as he could persuade himself to need. My
humble position was that of agency aide. When the special agent was
present for duty I was his chief executive officer; in his absence I
represented him (with greater or less fidelity to the original and to my
conscience) and was invested with his powers. In the Selma agency the
property that we were expected to seize and defend as best we might was
mostly plantations (whose owners had disappeared; some were dead, others
in hiding) and cotton. The country was full of cotton which had been sold
to the Confederate Government, but not removed from the plantations to
take its chance of export through the blockade. It had been decided that
it now belonged to the United States. It was worth about five hundred
dollars a bale--say one dollar a pound. The world agreed that that was a
pretty good price for cotton.

Naturally the original owners, having received nothing for their product
but Confederate money which the result of the war had made worthless,
manifested an unamiable reluctance to give it up, for if they could market
it for themselves it woul