disposed I might otherwise have been.  The lass asked me, with some feeling of scorn, “Is the boat yours?” to which I was forced to answer in the negative.  She protested that she would not go back and get a permit or pass from anyone on earth; that the boat was not mine, and she had as much right to its use as anyone, and that no one should prevent her from getting bread for her family, and that “you have no business here at best,” arguments that were hard to controvert in the face of a firey young “diamond in the rough.”  So to compromise matters and allow chivalry to take, for the time being, the place of duty, I agreed to ferry her over myself.  She placed her corn in the middle of the little boat, planting herself erect in the prow; I took the stern.  The weather was freezing cold, the wind strong, and the waves rolled high, the little boat rocking to and fro, while I battled with the strong current of the river.  Once or twice she cast disdainful glances at my feeble and emaciated form, but at last, in a melting tone, she said:  “If you can’t put the boat over, get up and give me the oar.”  This taunt made me strong, and the buxom mountain girl was soon at the mill.  While awaiting the coming of the old miller, I concluded to take a stroll over the hill in search of further adventure.  There I found, at a nice old-fashioned farm house, a bevy of the prettiest young ladies it had been my pleasure to meet in a long while—­buoyant, vivacious, cultured, and loyal to the core.  They did not wait very long to tell me that they were “Rebels to the bone.”  They invited me and any of my friends that I chose to come over the next day and take dinner with them, an invitation I was not loath nor slow to accept.  My mountain acquaintance was rowed back over the Holston in due season, without any of the parting scenes that fiction delight in, and the next day, armed with passports, my friends and myself were at the old farm house early.  My companions were Colonel Rutherford, Dr. James Evans, Lieutenant Hugh Farley, Captains Nance, Cary, and Watts, with Adjutant Pope as our chaperone.  Words fail me here in giving a description of the dinner, as well as of the handsome young ladies that our young hostess had invited from the surrounding country to help us celebrate.

Now will any reader of this question the fact that Longstreet’s men suffered any great hardships, isolated as they were from the outside world?  This is but a sample of our sufferings.  We had night parties at the houses of the high and the low, dinners in season and out of season, and not an enemy outside of the walls of Knoxville.  Did we feel the cold?  Did the frozen ground cut our feet through our raw-hide moccasins?  Did any of the soldiers long for home or the opening of the next campaign?  Bah!