Belle Boyd, the Confederate spy.--National characteristics.-- Colonel Mosby.--Richmond to Danville.--Sleeping spoon-fashion.-- Glazier's "corrective point" suffers.--Saltatory entrance to a railroad car.--Colonel Joselyn.--Sympathy of North Carolinians.-- Ingenious efforts to escape.--Augusta.--Macon.--Turner again!-- "Carelessness" with firearms.--Tunneling.--Religious revival.-- Order from Confederate War Department.--Murder!--Fourth of July.--Macon to Savannah.--Camp Davidson.--More tunneling.
The celebrated Confederate spy, Belle Boyd, paid a visit to "Libby" in the latter part of March, and her presence created much comment among the prisoners. She was not that ideal of grace and gentleness which
"Untutored youth, Unlearned in the world's false subtleties,"
enthrones within the temple of his heart, but was, notwithstanding, a remarkable woman. With much of the enthusiasm that characterized "_La Pucelle_," she appears to have combined a considerable allowance of shrewdness, or common sense; a mixture of qualities, by the way, of more common occurrence than is generally supposed, among the northern and southern people of our continent. There is little difference between the "peartness" of the one, and the "smartness" of the other; or the "high tone" of the South, and the _nonchalance_ of the North. The common _national_ characteristic of the people of both sections, however, is the power of adapting themselves to every variety of circumstance. No matter what the importance, or the insignificance of the occasion, or event, upon which they perceive that their opportunity for the attainment of a desired object depends, they are ready at the right moment to seize and turn it to account; and while, to-day, the banks of the Ganges or the Tigris are made to yield up to them the fruits of their industry and produce, to-morrow, when a modification of the law of demand and supply prevails, we find the same men following the tide of fortune through humbler but equally useful channels. We are pre-eminently a practical people, and that this characteristic to some extent destroys the poetic aspect of American life, cannot be gainsaid. The homes of our infancy, the graves of our kindred, the hills upon whose summits we first felt the glory of the morning, the altar at which we first knelt in prayer, the rustic nook where we listened for the one step to which our boyish hearts beat sweetest time; have no power to trammel our migratory proclivities, or to check our local inconstancy. The sentiments with which such objects are indissolubly connected, are but tendrils clinging round the parent nest, and the wings of the new-fledged bird, bursting them asunder, it soars out into the world to contend and battle with its storms.