service as a military conductor, I was free to follow my own inclinations.
These three weeks were very fruitful in experiences, and I learned a good many things which I do not particularly care to set down in black and white, but which were worth knowing. Between what I saw and heard, both in the East and the West, I was beginning to understand why things did not move briskly, and why, in spite of successes in the field, the Confederate cause, instead of making headway, was losing ground; and I was, in a measure, prepared for the disasters which shortly after began to follow thick and fast. But, before disasters did come, there were some bright days, which, in my memory, seem brighter than, perhaps, they really were, from the contrast between them and the dismal times by which they were succeeded. These I enjoyed to the utmost, and when the darkness of defeat and disaster did begin to settle down upon the doomed Confederacy, I, for one, bore up with undaunted spirit to the very last hour, and was willing to fight the thing out even when every hope of success had vanished. But these are matters that do not properly come up for discussion in this place; and what we are now concerned with are the pleasant hours of genuine fun and frolic—the last I saw for many a day—that preceded the bursting of the storm-cloud which was beginning to overshadow the fortunes of the Confederacy.
