Overcoat he had none. Pantaloons had been torn to shreds and tatters by the brambles and thorn-bushes. He had a hat which was not all a hat. It was given to him, after he had lost his own in a Rebel barn, by a warm-hearted African, as a small tribute from the Intelligent Contraband to his old friend the Reliable Gentleman—by an African who felt with the most touching propriety that it would be a shame for any correspondent of The Tribune to go bareheaded as long as a single negro in America was the owner of a hat! It was a white wool relic of the old-red-sandstone period, with a sugar-loaf crown, and a broad brim drawn down closely over his ears, like the bonnet of an Esquimaux.
His boots were a stupendous refutation of the report that leather was scarce among the Rebels. I understood it to be no figure of rhetoric, but the result of actual and exact measurement, which induced him to call them the "Seven-Leaguers." The small portion of his body, which was visible between the tops of his boots and the bottom of his hat, was robed in an old gray quilt of Secession proclivities; and taken for all in all, with his pale, nervous face and his remarkable costume, he looked like a cross between the Genius of Intellectuality and a Rebel bushwhacker!
Before daylight, we shiveringly tapped on the door of a house at the foot of the Blue Ridge.
"Come in," was the welcome response.
Entering, we found a woman sitting by the log fire. Beginning to introduce ourselves, she interrupted:
"O, I know all about you. You are Yankee prisoners. Your friends who passed last evening told us you were coming, and I have been sitting up all night for you. Come to the fire and dry your clothes."
Stories about the War.
For two hours we listened to her tales of the war. The history of almost every Union family was full of romance. Each unstoried mountain stream had its incidents of daring, of sagacity, and of faithfulness; and almost every green hill had been bathed in that scarlet dew from which ever springs the richest and the ripest fruit.
Concealment here was difficult; so we were taken to the house of a neighbor, who also was waiting to welcome us. He took us to his storehouse, right by the road-side.