’The certainty that the graves of the members of the Chelsea and Boston Fusilier companies who fell in the advance on Bull Run, last July, have all been despoiled, with a probability that their bones were sent South, as relics, causes a deep feeling of indignation here.

’A citizen of Cambridge, Mass., who went to Bull Run to recover the remains of his brother, who belonged to a Boston company, gives a sad account of the sacrilege committed upon the graves of our soldiers by the rebels.  About twenty of a Boston company and a Chelsea company had been buried near each other, but every skull had been taken away, and nearly all the principal bones of the bodies were gone.  Some of the bodies had been dug out, and others pried out of the graves with levers, and in some the sleeves of uniforms were split to obtain the bones of the arms.  It was described as a sickening spectacle.’

When we recall the savage, half-Indian nature of many of the lower Southern troops, and the threats of scalping and mutilating, in which they so often indulged; and when we remember that even in Richmond, the body of John Brown’s son is still exposed, as the label on it intimates, not as a scientific preparation, but as a warning to Abolitionists; we see nothing extraordinary in such tales.  If professors, men of science, and ‘gentlemen’ can wreak vengeance on the harmless bodies of the dead, and place a placard, expressing the hope that it may be thus with those who simply differ with them in political opinions, it is not to be wondered at that their rude and ignorant confreres should dig up dead bodies, and send the bones home as relics.  It is just possible, however, that we do not appreciate the true motives of these Ghouls.  When Scanderbeg died, his enemies fought among themselves to obtain the smallest fragment of his bones, believing that their possession would confer on the lucky wearer some of the courage of the great hero himself.  And so it may be that these craven savages hope to get a little real Northern pluck and stubborn endurance.

* * * * *

We cheerfully find place for the following, dated from ’Willard’s, Washington, D.C., April 2d:’ 

’DEAR CONTINENTAL:  I know that the CONTINENTAL publishes nothing but original articles, and therefore beg you, at the request of your large and highly respectable Washington constituency, to find a shelf for the following, which is original with Bill H. Polk and the Louisville Dem’docrat:’ 

    THE EXPERIENCES OF GEORGE N. SANDERS—­HOW HE LEFT NASHVILLE, AND
    HOW HE HOPES TO GET TO RICHMOND.