Southern Historical Society Papers, Volume 9.
Reverend J. William Jones, Ed.

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[373] easily very good ones there, and at not very high prices either, if calculated in gold, though overwhelmingly high, if estimated in paper currency. Naturally, the little circle of my friends knew of my proposed journey, and much was the sympathy which I experienced from them. During my last evening before starting, so many of my friends dropped in to say good-bye and God-speed, that I had quite a little levee. Nearly every one presented me with some little gift supposed to be suitable for the out-fit of a cavalryman, which I intended to be, so that my trunk became quite a respectable sized arsenal. One had given me a sabre. It was so ponderous and formidable in appearance that we christened it in joke “Durandal,” after the far-famed brand of the redoubtable Taladin Roland. The only mode of concealment, when going aboard ship, which I could think of for this unwieldly instrument of destruction, was to tie it up with an umbrella in a roll of army blankets, which was supposed to look to the uninitiated like an ordinary traveling-rug with umbrellas thrust into it innocently; but in point of fact, it did not look a bit so. Why the detectives, of whom there were several unmistakably peering around inquisitively on the wharf, did not bag me, I do not comprehend. I had been a Confederate soldier but a short time before I discovered that this much beloved “Durandal,” the bringing of which with me from New York, had given me a world of trouble, was rather an “elephant” on my hands, the use of cold steel having been almost superseded by “villanious saltpetre,” and that a sword could at any time be had for the asking.

Soon, however, in spite of my suspicious-looking luggage, I found myself aboard the good steamer “Corsica,” safe from molestation, under the flag of Old England.

After leaving I hobnobbed a good deal with an Englishman, an exofficer in the Horse-Guards, who had given up his commission for a time to enter the service of the Confederacy, whither he was now bound. A nice, plucky fellow he was, of gigantic, athletic build. He served the war out like a man, as I afterwards heard, and then returned to England, having gained no distinction for his trouble, but perfectly satisfied with his adventures nevertheless. I was told that he never complained of the hardships and privations of campaigning, but only grumbled at the difficulty of procuring mounts suitable to his unusual weight. My other fellow-travellers were bent on pleasure, or business; among them were no other recruits for the Southern army, so far as I knew.

After a short and pleasant voyage we arrived at Nassau. Before us lay the city of the blockade-runners floating on the surface of the still,