A friend told me of one old "maumer" who was more fortunate than many of her compeers. On Tuesday, when the army was leaving with its motley train of camp followers, this old woman was seen seated in a stolen carriage, drawn by stolen horses, dressed in the enormous headgear of aristocratic antebellum days, fanning herself-February though it was with a huge palmetto fan. My friend accosted her, "Hallo! Aunt Sallie, where are you going?" "La, honey! I'se gwine back inter de Union!" with a complacent and patronizing nod of her sable head.

No pen can adequately depict the horrors of the burning of Columbia. Every hearthstone was an altar on which the Yankees sacrificed to their gods-Vengeance and Hatred-and every blazing roof-tree will be a burning record against their wanton cruelty in the day of final account. All day the storm had been gathering. Here and there some outrageous act gave a foretaste of what was in store for the "Rebs." between the setting and rising of the sun.

Mr. B-, among other merchants, had struggled hard to protect his property through the day; but his store had repeatedly been broken open, and Yankees, negroes, and, oh, shame! some Southern whites, had plundered it at will. Seeing how useless it was to contend for order among the disorderly, and for law among the lawless, he abandoned everything and came home, where we waited, in a treacherous calm, the unfolding of events.

About 10 o'clock p. m. the signal rockets began to go up, and soon the incendiary fires blazed out. I was told that squads of drunken soldiers, followed by a rabble of drunken and excited negroes, paraded the principal thoroughfares, entering about every fourth house with torch and oil, and soon had blocks and whole streets one mass of living flame.

We stood in the observatory and saw these fires-these tokens of a nation's shame and sin-kindle, one by one, along the horizon's verge. Soon they flashed out of the darkness, nearer and nearer, rose higher and higher, spread wider and wider, until nearly the whole city became one seething sea of billowy fire.

My husband being Northern born, though strongly Southern in feeling, many persons thought his home would be spared; therefore, the house was packed from basement to attic with the furniture of our neighbors, sent hither for protection; but, alas! the Demon of Destruction was no respecter of persons or property, and at two o'clock in the morning I took a little bird in its cage, which I could not bear to leave to the flames, in one hand, and my little child's

hand in the other, and walked out from under our burning roof into the cold and pitiless street. Hundreds, nay thousands, were there before me; some not so well off as I, for they were invalids. None of us had any pillow but the frozen ground, nor any covering but the burning heavens.

The terrified lowing of cattle, the frenzied flight of pigeons circling high above their blazing cotes, the ribald jests and brutal assaults of our drunken conquerors, the dun clouds of despair rolling between us and the pitying eyes of God, made up a picture whose counterpart can be found only in the regions of the eternally lost. A Federal officer said to me next day, "I knew when General Sherman sent for the Seventeenth (Logan's) Army Corps that he had black work for it to do."

On Saturday morning we took refuge with some kind friends in the suburbs whose house had been overlooked rather than spared, and not until Sunday did we venture back to look at the ruins of our once beautiful home.

Oh! the utter, utter desolution of a city in ashes, and its people wanderers! Even the very landmarks were lost, and you stood a stranger on your own threshold. Nothing was left but the smokeless chimneys, keeping ward over the widespread ruin. Hundreds of Yankees, with ramrods and bayonets, were prodding the still smoking soil, in quest of buried treasure.

On Tuesday morning, the blue lines formed and the invaders left Columbia—a city once a synonym of all that was beautiful and elegant a heap of ruins; her living homeless and scattered; her dead insulted and desecrated. To me the curse of the broken-hearted sounded above their steady tramp and martial music. Confusion and terror went before them, and want and despair hovered in their rear. Vae victis may not have been inscribed on their banners, but it was written in characters of blood and living fire on the hearts and homes of a conquered people.

I remember going, a few Sabbaths after the destruction of the city, to hear one of our ministers. He was one who had been personally abused by the vandal horde in their mad riot on that fatal night, and a just and holy indignation still burned in his clerical bosom. "My friends," said he, warming in his discourse, "let us be faithful in following our Divine Master until we come to the New Jerusalem, the golden city, not a desolate place like this, but ever bright and fair, and I assure you, my friends, there will be no villainous Yankees there." Then, remembering that he was pledged to preach a doctrine

of forgiveness, he added, reluctantly and doubtfully, "Unless they have entirely new hearts." I could not refrain from adding a mental amen to this sentiment.

Necessity is said to be the mother of invention. If this be true, Columbians should have been the most inventive people on the face of the earth during that spring of 1865, for their needs were certainly great. Left without shelter, clothing or food, and with no means to obtain either, their condition was indeed deplorable. I heard of many persons sustaining life for several days upon the corn picked up around the feeding troughs of the Yankees' horses.

A lady, whom I had known in her days of prosperity, came to me with the tears streaming down her cheeks, and said, "If you have anything, divide with me; my little children are at home, crying for bread!" Alas! I was but little better off.

To the eternal honor of the negroes be it spoken that many of them aided and sustained their former owners in these trying times with a devotion as surprising as it was noble. One old fellow brought a store of provisions and laid it before his former master, saying, "Massa, it nearly breaks my heart to see you in dis old shanty, but it would break entirely to know you were hungry and couldn't get nothing to eat." "But, Peter, my good fellow," returned his master, "I cannot take these things from you and leave you and your children to starve." "No danger of dat; Peter's used to helping hisself, and dat, massa, you never could do; you nor old miss neither." "Peter," said the master, with a suspicious moisture about his eyes, "we have fallen upon evil days; but perhaps I might live to repay you." "You's done dat already, massa; you's took care of Peter a good many years, and I's sure its his time to take care of you and ole miss." All honor to Peter; and to all who, like him, did not forget

The tender grace of a day that is dead.

My friend, Mrs. H-, with whom we had taken refuge, had some negroes left in her charge by a relative who had fled from the city. It became a serious question how they should be fed, as she did not care to drive them away, and they showed no disposition to leave. "I'll tell you what I will do," said she; "I will go to Sherman and demand food for them. Will you go with me?" Although a disagreeable mission, I did not like to refuse, so, with a few other ladies who, like myself, were refugees, we set out to find General Sherman's headquarters. They were in the old Myers house, and a sentinel paced up and down in front of the gate.

"Where is General Sherman ?" asked Mrs. H-.
"He is not here," replied the sentinel.
"Where is he, then ?" impatiently.

"I don't know," indifferently.
"When will he be here?"

"I don't know."

Turning at the end of his beat, he saw Sherman coming around the corner. "That is General Sherman," indicating the approaching figure.

Mrs. H—, with characteristic impetuosity, rushed towards the general, exclaiming, "General Sherman, what is to become of these people?" As she spoke she pointed to the negroes, who had accompanied her.

"I really do not know," he replied, with an amused twinkle in the eyes that traveled from her face to the stolid darkeys.

"Are they to starve?" she exclaimed.

"I hope not," he replied composedly.

"But they will," she cried excitedly, "if you don't give them something to eat; and it is your duty to do it," she continued, disposed to read the general a homily. "You don't make war on them; you say you are their friend; they have nothing to eat, and will starve unless you feed them. General Sherman, will you let them starve?" "My friend," said he, going to her and patting her on the shoulder, "my friend, don't get excited. Be calm."

I forget whether he promised to provide for her dependents or not, but all the provisions they, or any one else, did get from the government was a very small portion of beef from some poor condemned cattle which were left in the college park when the Yankees took their final flitting.

Here let me give you an incident that occurred in our sister State of North Carolina: A surgeon-dentist, a man of position, ability, and unquestioned integrity, lived within that broad swath of desolation cut by the Federal Army in its victorious march. He afterwards came to Columbia, and from him I heard an account of the shameful outrage. Years had passed, and Columbia, rising from her sackcloth and ashes, had clothed herself anew in the beautiful and strong garments of energy and enterprise. We had accepted our trials as a part of the fortunes of war, and were disposed to forgive, if not to forget. Conversing one day with Dr. Gregg, our dentist, he expressed an undying hatred for the men who had caused him so much grief.

"If anybody," said he, "hates the wretches who followed Sherman's army more than I do, it is because his capacity for hating is greater than mine. This is strong language, but I am justified in using it. When Sherman's army passed through my place in North Carolina, some of his camp followers, in their greedy search for treasure, entered the graveyard, dug up my dead children, opened their coffins, and left their bodies exposed to birds and beasts, less vile than they. Tell me to forgive them? Never! My outraged dead, with their mute lips, cry out against it! The desecration of all the nameless bones of my countrymen, left to bleach on our hillsides and valleys, forbid it. Every instinct of my manhood is hatred towards those human jackals." MRS. S.-A. CRITTENDEN.

Greenville, S. C.

Recollections of the Burning of
Columbia.

Several thousand women and children, a handful of men, eightyfour squares of beautiful dwellings. Such was Columbia on February 14, 1865. On February 15, General Sherman and an army of sixty thousand men occupied the banks of the Congaree, on the Lexington side, and in two days the city presented the appearance of having passed through a rain of fire.

The shelling of the city commenced early Thursday morning. The shells fell thick and fast, in every direction, the arsenal and State House furnishing conspicuous marks. One fell directly at my mother's feet, but, fortunately, the fuse had been extinguished, and the missile did not explode. The sudden attack and the fear of what was to follow rendered us numb with fear, and we scarcely had power to take ourselves to a place of safety.

Fortunately, my father, just home from the army, although nearly dead with consumption, was with us, and we felt more secure than thousands of others less fortunate.

After an almost sleepless night, we were all startled about daybreak by a loud explosion. Hastily dressing and getting out, we learned that the South Carolina warehouse had been blown up, the wildest rumors were afloat as to its cause.

and

The "swish-swish" of the pontoons being laid for the army to cross told us that Sherman intended entering the city at once. In less than an hour afterward the work of pillage and destruction commenced. Drunken soldiers, the worst corps in the army, had been