on the table before him lay a loaded revolver, sentinels stood at the door, orderlies and soldiers crowded the anteroom. An Irishwoman was asking for a passport to go to her son in the Confederate army. After much billingsgate on both sides, 'Well, now, General Butler,' she said, 'the question is, are you going to give me a passport or are you not?' He coolly leaned back in his chair and with a provoking smile slowly replied: 'No, woman, I will never give a rebel mother a pass to go to see a rebel son.' She gazed at him a moment, and then as coolly and deliberately replied: 'General Butler, if I thought the devil was as ugly a man as you, I would double my prayers night and morning, that I might never fall into his clutches;' and, bolting past the sentinels, she disappeared."
It was at this period that the gentlemen among the Federal officers found their position under their commander intolerable, even for soldiers. Not being disciplined to his mode of warfare, they had, from the day of their occupation of the city, been overstrained by their secret anxieties and their efforts in behalf of the vanquished. Like the Spanish officers under O'Reilly, they found a thousand common feelings to counterbalance the one great political difference; past friendships, ties, relationships, if other reason were needed than the one that they were gentlemen, and their enemies women and children; fearfully and restlessly they haunted the streets, swarming with arrogant negro and white soldiers, quaking much more before an application of their general's order than the women themselves did; hence volumes of delicate episodes and pretty romances, which the women of the period love also to relate.
