"They rode a troop of bearded men,

Rode two and two out from the town,

And some were blonde and some were brown,

And all as brave as Sioux; but when

From San Bennetto south the line

That bound them to the haunts of men

Was passed, and peace stood mute behind

And streamed a banner to the wind
The world knew not, there was a sign
Of awe, of silence, rear and van.
Men thought who never thought before;
I heard the clang and clash of steel,
From sword at hand or spur at heel,
And iron feet, but nothing more.
Some thought of Texas, some of Maine,
But more of rugged Tennessee-
Of scenes in Southern vales of wine,
And scenes in Northern hills of pine,
As scenes they might not meet again;
And one of Avon thought, and one
Thought of an isle beneath the sun,
And one of Rowley, one the Rhine,
And one turned sadly to the Spree."

JOAQUIN MILLER.

WHAT follows may read like a romance; it was the saddest reality this life could offer to many a poor fellow who now sleeps in a foreign and forgotten grave somewhere in the tropics-somewhere between the waters of the Rio Grande and the Pacific Ocean.

The American has ever been a wayward and a truant race. There are passions which seem to belong to them by some strange fatality of birth or blood. In every port, under all flags, upon every

island, shipwrecked and stranded upon the barren or golden shores of adventure, Americans can be found, taking fate as it comes—a devil-may-care, reckless, good-natured, thrifty and yet thriftless race, loving nothing so well as their country except an enterprise full of wonder and peril. Board a merchant vessel in mid-ocean and there is an American at the wheel. Steer clear of a lean, lank, rakish-looking craft beating up from the windward toward Yucatan, and overboard as a greeting, comes the full roll of an AngloSaxon voice, half-familiar and half piratical. The angular features peer out from under sombreros, bronzed and brown though they may be, telling of faces seen somewhere about the cities—eager, questioning faces, a little sad at times, yet always stern enough for broil or battle. They cruise in the foreign rivers and rob on the foreign shores. Whatever is uppermost finds ready hands. No guerrillas are more daring than American guerrillas; the church has no more remorseless despoilers; the women no more ardent and faithless lovers; the haciendas no more sturdy defenders; the wine cup no more devoted proselytes; the stranger armies no more heroic soldiers; and the stormy waves of restless emigration no more sinster waifs, tossed hither and thither, swearing in all tongues-rude, boisterous, dangerous in drink, ugly at cards, learning revolver-craft quickest and surest, and dying as they love to die, game to the last.

Of such a race came all who had preceded the one thousand Confederates led by Shelby into Mexico. He found many of them there. Some he hung and some he recruited, the last possibly not the best.

The war in the Trans-Mississippi Department had been a holiday parade for some; a ceaseless battle and raid for others. Shelby's division of Missourians was the flower of this army. He had formed and fashioned it upon an ideal of his own. He had a maxim, borrowed from Napoleon without knowing it, which was: “Young men for war." Hence all that long list of boy heroes who died before maturity from Pocahontas, Arkansas, to Newtonia, Missouri, died in that last march of 1864, the stupidest, wildest, wantonest, wickedest march ever made by a general who had a voice like a lion and a spring like a guinea pig. Shelby did the fighting, or, rather, what he could of it. After Westport, eight hundred of these Missourians were buried in a night. The sun that set at Mine Creek set as well upon a torn and decimated division, bleeding at every step, but resolute and undaunted. That night the dead were not buried.

Newtonia came after-the last battle west of the Mississippi river. It was a prairie fight, stern, unforgiving, bloody beyond all comparison for the stakes at issue, fought far into the night, and won by him who had won so many before that he had forgotten to

count them. General Blunt is rich, alive and a brave man and a happy man over in Kansas. He will bear testimony again, as he has often done before, that Shelby's fighting at Newtonia surpassed any he had ever seen. Blunt was a grim fighter himself, be it remembered, surpassed by none who ever held the border for the Union.

The

The retreat southward from Newtonia was a famine. flour first gave out, then the meal, then the meat, then the medicines. The recruits suffered more in spirit than in flesh, and fell out by the wayside to die. The old soldiers cheered them all they could and tightened their own sabre belts. Hunger was a part of their rations. The third day beyond the Arkansas river, hunger found an ally-small pox. In cities and among civilized beings this is fearful. Among soldiers, and, therefore, machines, it is but another name for death. They faced it as they would a line of battle, waiting for the word. That came in this wise: Shelby took every wagon he could lay his hands upon, took every blanket the dead men left, and improvised a hospital. While life lasted in him, a soldier was never abandoned. There was no shrinking; each detachment in detail mounted guard over the terrible cortegeprotected it, camped with it, waited upon it, took its chances as it took its rest. Discipline and humanity fraternized. The weak hands of the one were intertwined with the bronzed hands of the other. Even amid the pestilence there was poetry.

The gaps made in the ranks were ghastly. Many whom the bullets had scarred and spared were buried far from soldierly bivouacs or battle-fields War has these species of attacks, all the more overwhelming because of their inglorious tactics. Fever can not be fought, nor that hideous leprosy which kills after it has defaced.

One day the end came, after much suffering and heroism and devotion. A picture like this, however, is only painted that one may understand the superb organization of that division which was soon to be a tradition, a memory, a grim war spirit, a thing of gray and glory forevermore.

After the ill-starred expedition made to Missouri in 1864, the Trans-Mississippi army went to sleep. It numbered about fifty thousand soldiers, rank and file, and had French muskets, French cannon, French medicines, French ammunition and French gold. Matamoras, Mexico, was a port the Government could not or did not blockade, and from one side of the river there came to it all manner of supplies, and from the other side all kinds and grades of cotton. This dethroned king had transferred its empire from the Carolinas to the Gulf, from the Tombigbee to the Rio Grande. It was a fugitive king, however, with a broken sceptre and a mere. tricious crown. Afterward it was guillotined.