feast. Hereabout houses had been demolished; and there beyond,
around the great temple that had first attracted his attention
from the Iowa shore, armed men were bivouacked. This worthy
representative of our country's service was challenged by the
drunken crowd, and made to give an account of himself, and to
answer for having crossed the river without a permit from the
head of the band. Finding that he was a stranger, they related
to him in fiendish glee their recent exploits of pillage, rapine,
and murder. They conducted him through the temple; everywhere
were marks of their brutish acts; its altars of prayer were
broken; the baptismal font had been so "diligently desecrated as
to render the apartment in which it was contained too noisome to
abide in." There in the steeple close by the "scar of divine
wrath" left by a recent thunderbolt, were broken covers of liquor
and drinking vessels.

Sickened with the sight, disgusted with this spectacle of
outrage, the colonel recrossed the river at nightfall, beating
upward, for the wind had freshened. Attracted by a faint light
near the bank, he approached the spot, there to find a few
haggard faces surrounding one who seemed to be in the last stages
of fever. The sufferer was partially protected by something like
a tent made from a couple of bed sheets; and amid such
environment, the spirit was pluming itself for flight. Making
his way through this camp of misery, he heard the sobbings of
children hungry and sick; there were men and women dying from
wounds or disease, without a semblance of shelter or other
physical comfort; wives in the pangs of maternity, ushering into
the world innocent babes doomed to be motherless from their
birth. And at intervals, to the ears of those outcasts, the sick