firmly believes that he is going forth to Mexico to establish an
American empire, and that it is his divine mission to destroy the
dragon of democracy and reestablish the true Church, the Right
Divine, and all sorts of games. Poor young man! . . .

"Our information from home is to the 12th. Charleston seems to be
in 'articulo mortis,' but how forts nowadays seem to fly in the face
of Scripture. Those founded on a rock, and built of it, fall easily
enough under the rain of Parrotts and Dahlgrens, while the house
built of sand seems to bid defiance to the storm."

In quoting from these confidential letters I have been restrained from
doing full justice to their writer by the fact that he spoke with such
entire freedom of persons as well as events. But if they could be read
from beginning to end, no one could help feeling that his love for his
own country, and passionate absorption of every thought in the strife
upon which its existence as a nation depended, were his very life during
all this agonizing period. He can think and talk of nothing else, or,
if he turns for a moment to other subjects, he reverts to the one great
central interest of "American politics," of which he says in one of the
letters from which I have quoted, "There is nothing else worth thinking
of in the world."

But in spite of his public record as the historian of the struggle for
liberty and the champion of its defenders, and while every letter he
wrote betrayed in every word the intensity of his patriotic feeling, he
was not safe against the attacks of malevolence. A train laid by unseen
hands was waiting for the spark to kindle it, and this came at last in
the shape of a letter from an unknown individual,--a letter the existence
of which ought never to have been a matter of official recognition.