Although I appeared in the dress of an assistant-surgeon, with the M.S. upon my cap, I could gain no access to the army outside of the city, nor make any headway in my tour of observation; and as they charged me five dollars per day at the Ballard House, I must soon leave, or be swamped.  I had not been so completely foiled in my plans hitherto.

I left Richmond for Selma the 20th of May, reflecting bitterly upon the character of a rebellion which, commenced in fraud, was perpetuating itself by forcing its enemies to fight their own friends, and then refused to pay them the stipulated price of their enforced service.  The longer I reflected, the more fully was I convinced that I never would receive my pay.  The conscription act, which took effect the 16th of May, was being enforced with a sweeping and searching universality.  If I returned to Corinth to seek the quartermaster there, the payment would be deferred, from one excuse or another, until I should be forced into the service again.  The thought that the Rebel authorities were breaking their pledges to pay me, that they might get their hated coils around me once more, from which I had but partially extricated myself, almost maddened me.  I knew, moreover, that I could not long remain in Selma, in my present situation.  The men were all recovering, except one poor fellow, who soon passed beyond the reach of earthly mutilations, and no new shipments of wounded were coming on.  And the force of public opinion in Selma was such, that no man able to fight could remain there.  The unmarried ladies were so patriotic, that every able-bodied young man was constrained to enlist.  Some months previous to this, a gentleman was known to be engaged for an early marriage, and hence declined to volunteer.  When his betrothed, a charming girl and a devoted lover, heard of his refusal, she sent him, by the hand of a slave, a package inclosing a note.  The package contained a lady’s skirt and crinoline, and the note these terse words:  “Wear these, or volunteer.”  He volunteered.

When will the North wake up to a true and manly patriotism in the defence of their national life, now threatened by the tiger-grasp of this atrocious Rebellion?  Hundreds upon hundreds of young men I see in stores and shops, doing work that women could do quite as well; and large numbers of older men who have grown wealthy under the protection of our benign government, are idly grieving over the taxation which the war imposes, and meanly asking if it will not soon end, that their coffers may become plethoric of gold; while the question is still unsettled whether the Rebellion shall sweep them and their all into the vortex of ruin and anarchy. The North is asleep! and it will become the sleep of death, national death, if a new spirit be not speedily awaked!

CHAPTER VII.

MY ESCAPE.