CHAPTER VII.
ENTERING RICHMOND--DISAPPOINTMENT AT ITS APPEARANCE--EVERYBODY IN UNIFORM--CURLED DARLINGS OF THE CAPITAL--THE REBEL FLAG--LIBBY PRISON -- DICK TURNER--SEARCHING THE NEW COMERS.
Early on the tenth morning after our capture we were told that we were about to enter Richmond.

Instantly all were keenly observant of every detail in the surroundings of a City that was then the object of the hopes and fears of thirty-five millions of people--a City assailing which seventy-five thousand brave men had already laid down their lives, defending which an equal number had died, and which, before it fell, was to cost the life blood of another one hundred and fifty thousand valiant assailants and defenders.
So much had been said and written about Richmond that our boyish minds had wrought up the most extravagant expectations of it and its defenses.
We anticipated seeing a City differing widely from anything ever seen before; some anomaly of nature displayed in its site, itself guarded by imposing and impregnable fortifications, with powerful forts and heavy guns, perhaps even walls, castles, postern gates, moats and ditches, and all the other panoply of defensive warfare, with which romantic history had made us familiar.
We were disappointed--badly disappointed--in seeing nothing of this as we slowly rolled along.

The spires and the tall chimneys of the factories rose in the distance very much as they had in other Cities we had visited.

We passed a single line of breastworks of bare yellow sand, but the scrubby pines in front were not cut away, and there were no signs that there had ever been any immediate expectation of use for the works.
A redoubt or two--without guns--could be made out, and this was all.
Grim-visaged war had few wrinkles on his front in that neighborhood.
They were then seaming his brow on the Rappahannock, seventy miles away, where the Army of Northern Virginia and the Army of the Potomac lay confronting each other.
At one of the stopping places I had been separated from my companions by entering a car in which were a number of East Tennesseeans, captured in the operations around Knoxville, and whom the Rebels, in accordance with their usual custom, were treating with studied contumely.

I had always had a very warm side for these simple rustics of the mountains and valleys.