tion of the casualties incident to a campaign, even when not actively engaged with the enemy. One of the Illinois volunteers attached to Captain Lee's corps of pioneers, was cruelly mutilated by a ponton sliding from a wagon, which struck him near the abdomen, forcing out his intestines, and otherwise lacerating his person in the most frightful manner. He survived several days, suffering the most acute pain, and subjected to all the torture that such an injury could inflict. Two or three days before the march was resumed, several volleys of musketry, fired in quick succession, were heard by the sentinels, early in the morning, in the direction of the town. At first no notice was taken of the fact, but from the repeated discharges, it was deemed proper to report it to the commanding general, who with all his watchfulness was caught napping for once. Though it could hardly be possible that an armed enemy should be in that quarter, in a few moments the camp was in commotion. The bugles of the dragoons sounded "to horse;" the drums of the infantry beat "the general." The horns of the Arkansas regiment emitted certain sounds understood by themselves, for they were very soon in their saddles. In the mean time, men half-dressed were hurrying to and fro, all knowing there was an excitement, but very few knowing why. Some were in pursuit of horses, grazing beyond the camp; some returning from the water, and all apparently busy about every thing, save preparation for a battle. The mounted troops were ordered to town to investigate the affair which seemed to involve so much mystery, and the artillery and infantry were formed in line of battle to await events. Each man was ready at the signal to "Let slip the dogs of war." The report finally came, and lo! the consternation had been created by a salute common, it is said, in this country-fired over the grave of a Mexican baby. A very lame and impotent conclusion certainly, but how could it have been otherwise? There was no one with whom an enemy could engage except ourselves, and we had not been invited to such an entertainment. Captain and Lieutenant of the Topographical Engineers, escorted by a squadron of cavalry, the whole under left on a reconnaissance in the direction of San Fernando and Santa Rosa, one day in advance of the army. com Then A new turn was also given to the machinery of monotony, in the way of a review, the great feature of which was the performance of one of the panies. At the head of the detachment with which this company was embodied, rode in his round hat and black coat; having too keen a sense of the ridiculous not to know that in his position it would be a burlesque to affect the soldier even in appearance. came the main body. Covered with hats, broad brim, narrow brim, and no brim at all, straw, chip, felt, and fur, the whole of the class known as "shocking bad;" with coats of every shape, of every hue, and of every material, and not a few coatless; jackets without skirts and with one skirt -razeed from necessity, with collars and without; trousers like Jacob's cattle, "ring-streaked, speckled, and grizzled;" white, black, blue, brown, and dingy; in short, it may be doubted if heroism were ever more thoroughly disguised or fantastically arrayed. Among the banners redoubtably borne on this occasion, one blazed with the inscription "Try us," and another, that had probably served a similar purpose during the presidential campaign, flaunted the execrable, because false and hypocritical sentiment, "Extend the area of Freedom." (To be Continued.) FIRESIDE TRAVELS. CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO. A MEMOIR ADDRESSED TO THE EDELMANN STORG IN ROME. IN those quiet old winter evenings, around our Roman fireside, it was not seldom, my dear Storg, that we talked of the advantages of travel, and in speeches not so long that our cigars would forget their fire (the measure of just conversation) debated the comparative advantages of the Old and the New Worlds. You will remember how serenely I bore the imputation of provincialism, while I asserted that those advantages were reciprocal; that an orbed and balanced life would revolve between the Old and the New as its opposite, but not antagonistic, poles, the true equator lying somewhere midway between them. I asserted also that there were two epochs at which a man might travel, before twenty, for pure enjoyment, and after thirty, for instruction. At twenty, the eye is sufficiently delighted with merely seeing; new things are pleasant only because they are not old; and we take every thing heartily and naturally in the right way, events being always like knives, which either serve us or cut us, as we grasp them by the blade or the handle. After thirty, we carry with us our scales with lawful weights stamped by experience, and our chemical tests acquired by study, with which to ponder and assay all arts, and institutions, and manners, and to ascertain either their absolute worth, or their merely relative value to ourselves. On the whole, I declared myself in favor of the after-thirty method,-was it partly (so difficult is it to distinguish between opinions and personalities) because I had tried it myself, though with scales so imperfect and tests so inadequate? Perhaps so, but more because I held that a man should have travelled thoroughly round himself and the great terra incognita just outside and inside his own threshold, before he undertook voyages of discovery to other worlds. Let him first thoroughly explore that strange country laid down on the maps as SEAUTON; let him look down into its craters and find whether they be burnt out or only sleeping; let him know between the good and evil fruits of its passionate tropics; let him experience how healthful are its serene and high-lying table-lands; let him be many times driven back (till he wisely consent to be baffled) from its metaphysical northwest passages that lead only to the dreary solitudes of a sunless world, before he think himself morally equipped for travels to more distant regions. But does he commonly even so much as think of this, or, while buying amplest trunks for his corporeal apparel, does it once occur to him how very small a portmanteau will contain all his mental and spiritual outfit? Oftener, it is true, that a man who could scarce be induced to expose his unclothed body, even in a village of prairie-dogs, will complacently display a mind as naked as the day it was born, without so much as a fig-leaf of acquirement on it, in every gallery of Europe. If not with a robe dyed in the Tyrian purple of imaginative culture, if not with the close-fitting, active dress of social or business training,-at least, my dear Storg, one might provide himself with the merest waist-cloth of modesty ! But if it be too much to expect men to traverse and survey themselves before they go abroad, we might certainly ask that they should be familiar with their own villages. If not even that, then it is of little import whither they go, and let us hope that, by seeing how calmly their own narrow neighorhood bears their departure, they may be led to think that the circles of disturbance set in motion by the fall of their tiny drop into the ocean of eternity, will not have a radius of more than a week in any direction; and that the world can endure the subtraction of even a justice of the peace with provoking equanimity. In this way, at least, foreign travel may do them good, may make them, if not wiser, at any rate less fussy. Is it a great way to go to school, and a great fee to pay for the lesson? We cannot pay too much for that genial stoicism which, when life flouts us and says-Put THAT in your pipe and smoke it!-can puff away with as sincere a relish as if it were tobacco of Mount Lebanon in a narghileh of Damascus. After all, my dear Storg, it is to know things that one has need to travel, and not men. Those force us to come to them, but these come to us-sometimes whether we will or no. These exist for us in every variety in our own town. You may find your antipodes without a voyage to China; he lives there, just round the next corner, precise, formal, the slave of precedent, making all his tea-cups with a break in the edge, because his model had one, and your fancy decorates him with an endlessness of airy pigtail. There, too, are John Bull, Jean Crapaud, Hans Sauerkraut, Pat Murphy, and the rest. It has been well said "He needs no ship to cross the tide, E'er shaped the world to weal or woe,- His village-microcosm can show." But things are good for nothing out of their natural habitat. If the heroic Barnum had succeeded in transplanting Shakespeare's house to America, what interest would it have had for us, torn out of its appropriate setting in softly-hilled Warwickshire, which showed us that the most English of poets must be born in the most English of counties? I mean by a Thing that which is not a mere spectacle, that which the mind leaps forth to, as it also leaps to the mind, as soon as they come within each other's sphere of attraction, and with instantaneous coalition form a new product knowledge. Such, in the understanding it gives us of early Roman history, is the little territory around Rome, the gentis cunabula, without a sight of which, Livy and Niebuhr and the maps are vain. So, too, one must go to Pompeii and the Museo Borbonico, to get a true conception of that wondrous artistic nature of the Greeks, strong enough, even in that petty colony, to survive foreign conquest and to assimilate barbarian blood, showing a grace and fertility of invention, whose Roman copies Raffaello himself could only copy, and enchanting even the base utensils of the kitchen with an inevitable sense of beauty to which we subterranean Northmen have not yet so much as dreamed of climbing. Mere sights one can see quite as well at home. Mont Blanc does not tower more grandly in the memory, than did the dream-peak which loomed afar on the morning-horizon of hope; nor did the smoke-palm of Vesuvius stand more erect and fair, with tapering stem and spreading top, in that Parthenopeian air than under the diviner sky of imagination. I know what Shakespeare says about home-keeping youths, and I can fancy what you will add about America being interesting only as a phenomenon, and uncomfortable to live in, because we have not yet done with getting ready to live. But is not your Europe, on the other hand, a place where men have done living for the present, and of value chiefly because of the men who had done living in it long ago? And if, in our rapidly-moving country, one feel sometimes as if he had his home in a railroad train, is there not also a satisfaction in knowing that one is going somewhere? To what end visit Europe, if people carry with them, as most do, their old parochial horizon, going hardly as Americans even, much less as men? Have we not both seen persons abroad who put us in mind of parlor goldfish in their vase, isolated in that little globe of their own element, incapable of communication with the strange world around them, a show themselves, while it was always doubtful if they could see at all beyond the limits of their portable prison? The wise man travels to discover himself; it is to find himself out that he goes out of himself and his habitual associations, trying every thing in turn till he find that one activity, sovran over him by divine right, toward which all the disbanded powers of his nature and the irregular tendencies of his life gather joyfully, as to the common rallying-point of their loyalty. All these things we debated while the ilex logs upon the hearth burned down to tinkling coals, over which a gray, soft moss of ashes grew betimes, mocking the poor wood with a pale travesty of that green and gradual decay on forest-floors, its natural end. Already the clock at the Capuccini told the morning quarters, and on the pauses of our talk no sound intervened but the muffled hoot of an owl in the near convent-garden, or the rattling tramp of a patrol of that French army which keeps him a prisoner in his own city, who claims to lock and unlock the doors of heaven. But still the discourse would eddy round_one obstinate rocky tenet of mine, for I maintained, you remember, that the wisest man was he who stayed at home; that to see the antiquities of the old world was nothing, since the youth of the world was really no farther away from us than our own youth; and that, moreover, we had also in America things amazingly old, as our boys, for example. Add, that in the end this antiquity is a matter of comparison, which skips from place to place as nimbly as Emerson's sphinx, and that one old thing is good only till we have seen an older. England is ancient till we go to Rome. Etruria dethrones Rome, but only to pass this sceptre of Antiquity which so lords it over our fancies to the Pelasgi, from whom Egypt straightway wrenches it to give it up in turn to older India. And whither then? As well rest upon the first step, since the effect of what is old upon the mind is single and positive, not cumulative. As soon as a thing is past, it is as infinitely far away from us as if it had happened millions of years ago. And if the learned Huet be correct, who reckoned that every human thought and record could be included in ten folios, what so frightfully old as we ourselves, who can, if we choose, hold in our memories every syllable of recorded time, from the first crunch of Eve's teeth in the apple, downward, being thus ideally contemporary with hoariest Eld? "The pyramids built up with newer might To us are nothing novel, nothing strange." Now, my dear Storg, you know my (what the phrenologists call) inhabitiveness and adhesiveness, how I stand by the old thought, the old thing, the old place, and the old friend, till I am very sure I have got a better, and even then migrate painfully. Remember the old Arabian story, and think how hard it is to pick up all the pomegranate-seeds of an opponent's argument, and how, as long as one remains, you are as far from the end as ever. Since I have you entirely at my mercy (for you cannot answer me under five weeks) you will not be surprised at the advent of this letter. I had always one impregnable position, which was, that however good other places might be, there was only one in which we could be born, and which therefore possessed a quite peculiar and inalienable virtue. We had the fortune, which neither of us have had reason to call other than good, to journey together through the green, secluded valley of boyhood; together we climbed the mountain wall which shut it in, and looked down upon those Italian plains of early manhood; and, since then, we have met sometimes by a well, or broken bread together at an oasis in the arid desert of life as it truly is. With this letter I propose to make you my fellow-traveller in one of those fireside voyages which, as we grow older, we make oftener and oftener through our own past. Without leaving your elbow-chair, you shall go back with me thirty years, which will bring you among things and persons as thoroughly preterite as Romulus or Numa. For, so rapid are our changes in America, that the transition from old to new, the change from habits and associations to others entirely different, is as rapid almost as the pushing in of one scene and the drawing out of another on the stage. And it is this which makes America so interesting to the philosophic student of history and man. Here, as in a theatre, the great problems of anthropology, which in the old world were ages in solving, but which are solved, leaving only a dry net result; are compressed, as it were, into the entertainment of a few hours. Here we have I know not how many epochs of history and phases of civilization contemporary with each other, nay, within five minutes of each other by the electric telegraph. In two centuries we have seen rehearsed the dispersion of man from a small point over a whole continent; we witness with our own eyes the action of those forces which govern the great migration of the peoples, now historical in Europe; we can watch the action and reaction of different races, forms of government, and higher or lower civilizations. Over there, you have only the dead precipitate, demanding tedious analysis; but here the elements are all in solution, and we have only to look to know them all. History, which every day makes less account of governors and more of man, must find here the compendious key to all that picture-writing of the Past. Therefore it is, my dear Storg, that we Yankees may still esteem our America a place worth living in. But calm your apprehensions: I do not propose to drag you with me on such an historical circumnavigation of the globe, but only to show you that (however needful it may be to go abroad for the study of æsthetics) a man who uses the eyes of his heart, may find here also pretty bits of what may be called the social picturesque, and little landscapes over which that Indian-summer atmosphere of the Past broods as sweetly and tenderly as over a Roman ruin. Let us look at the Cambridge of thirty years since. The seat of the oldest college in America, it had, of course, some of that cloistered quiet which characterizes all university-towns. But, underlying this, it had an idiosyncrasy of its own. Boston was not yet a city, and Cambridge was still a country village, with its own habits and traditions, not yet feeling too strongly the force of suburban gravitation. Approaching it from the west by what was then called the New Road (it is called so no longer, for we change our names whenever we can, to the great detriment of all historical association) you would pause on the brow of Symonds' Hill to enjoy a view singularly soothing and placid. In front of you lay the town, tufted with elms, lindens, and horse-chesnuts, which had seen Massachusetts a colony, and were fortunately unable to emigrate with the tories by whom, or by whose fathers, they were planted. Over it rose the noisy belfry of the college, the square, brown tower of the church, and the slim, yellow spire of the parish meeting-house, by no means ungraceful, and then an invariable characteristic of New England religious architecture. On your right, the Charles slipped smoothly through green and purple salt-meadows, darkened, here and there, with the blossoming black-grass as with a stranded cloud-shadow. Over these marshes, level as water, but without its glare, and with softer and more soothing gradations of perspective, the eye was carried to a horizon of softly-rounded hills. To your left hand, upon the Old Road, you saw some half-dozen dignified old houses of the colonial time, all comfortably fronting southward. If it were spring-time, the rows of horse-chesnuts along the fronts of these houses showed, through every crevice of their dark heap of foliage, and on the end of every drooping limb, a cone of pearly flowers, while the hill behind was white or rosy with the crowding blooms of various fruit trees. There is no sound, unless a horseman clatters over the loose planks of the bridge, while his antipodal shadow glides silently over the mirrored bridge below, or unless "Oh, winged rapture, feathored soul of spring, Shepherding her white flocks of woolly clouds, Such was the charmingly rural picture which he who, thirty years ago, went eastward over Symonds' Hill, had given him for nothing to hang in the Gallery of Memory. But we are a city now, and Common Councils have yet no notion of the truth (learned long ago by many a European hamlet) that picturesqueness adds to the actual money-value of a town. To save a few dollars in gravel, they have cut a kind of dry ditch through the hill, where you suffocate with dust in summer, or flounder through waist-deep snowdrifts in winter, with no prospect but the crumbling earth-walls on each side. The landscape was carried away, cartload by cartload, and, deposited on the roads, forms a part of that unfathomable pudding, which has, I fear, driven many a teamster and pedestrian to the use of phrases not commonly found in English. dictionaries. We called it "the Village" then (I speak of Old Cambridge), and it was essentially an English village, quiet, unspeculative, without enterprise, sufficing to itself, and only showing such differences from the original type as the public school and the system of town government might superinduce. A few houses, chiefly old, stood around the bare common, with ample elbow-room, and old women, capped and spectacled, still peered through the same windows from which they had watched Lord Percy's artillery rumble by to Lexington, or caught a glimpse of the handsome Virginia General who had come to wield our homespun Saxon chivalry. People were still living who regretted the late unhappy separation from the Mother Island, who had seen no gentry since the Vassals went, and who thought that Boston had ill kept the day of her patron saint, Botolph, on the 17th June, 1775. The hooks were to be seen from which had swung the hammocks of Burgoyne's captive red-coats. memory does not deceive me, women still washed clothes in the town-spring, clear as that of Bandusia. One coach sufficed for all the travel to the metropolis. Commencement had not ceased to be the great holiday of the Puritan Commonwealth, and a fitting one it was-the festival of Santa Scolastica, whose triumphal path one may conceive strewn with leaves of spelling-book instead of bay. The students (scholars they were called then) wore their sober uniform, not ostentatiously distinctive nor capable of rousing democratic envy, and the old lines of caste were blurred rather than rubbed out, as servitor was softened into beneficiary. The Spanish king was sure that the gesticulating student was either mad or reading Don Quixotte, and if, in those days, you met a youth swinging his arms and talking to himself, you might conclude that he was either a lunatic or one who was to If appear in a "part" at the next Commencement. A favorite place for the rehearsal of these orations was the retired amphitheatre of the Gravelpit, perched unregarded on whose dizzy edge, I have heard many a burst of plus-quam-Ciceronian eloquence, and (often repeated) the regular saluto vos praestantissimas, &c., which every year (with a glance at the gallery) causes a flutter among the fans innocent of Latin, and delights to applauses of conscious superiority the youth almost as innocent as they. It is curious, by the way, to note how plainly one can feel the pulse of self in the plaudits of an audience. At a political meeting, if the |