ments, and ferret out their plans in a signally advantageous manner: and, confident that my cunning and skill would enable me to perform an important work, I was really anxious to see the enemy occupy the city, in order that I might try conclusions with them, having ample confidence that I would prove myself a match for the smartest Yankee of them all.
I was the more willing to try and distinguish myself in a new field, as I had amply demonstrated to my own satisfaction, and to that of thousands of the best fighting men of the Confederate armies, that I lacked nothing of the valorous disposition of a soldier, and that I could stand without flinching before the hottest fire of the enemy, and I aspired to win fresh laurels by performing services of a kind that would require an exertion of all my intellectual faculties, and that would, if I were to be even reasonably successful, bring me more real credit, and more enduring fame, than almost any performances in the field that I might undertake. After nearly a year of service, I was just beginning to appreciate the fact that I occupied a unique position, and that my efforts would be almost profitless, alike to me and to the Confederate cause, if I was content merely to figure as an additional combatant when the actual clash of battle came; and while I did not regret, for a great variety of reasons, my experiences in the field, I was very well satisfied to abandon, for a while at least, a soldier's life for the purpose of undertaking work more naturally congenial than campaigning, and for which my sex, combined with my soldierly training, peculiarly fitted me. My experimental trip to Washington satisfied me that it was as a detective, rather than as a soldier, that my best successes were to be won; and now that one of my most important surmises, based upon almost the barest hints obtained on that trip, was proven to have been well founded, I was inspired by a special zeal to carry out intentions which I had been revolving in my mind ever since my visit to the Federal capital. These intentions I had intended to carry out long before, and had I accepted the invitation to return to Virginia, which I received some time before the battle of Fort Donelson, I doubtless would, long ere this, have been actively employed in passing through the Federal lines in search of information. The acceptance of that invitation was, however, delayed, and finally abandoned, and circumstances prevented my making a very serious effort to become an active attache of the detective corps up to the date of the fall of New Orleans. With the
