the offer of rooms in the house itself lest he should trespass on the convenience of its inmates; and to show the peculiar constitution of the Confederate army, an anecdote recorded by his biographers is worth quoting.  After his first interview with Mrs. Corbin, he passed out to the gate, where a cavalry orderly who had accompanied him was holding his horse.  “Do you approve of your accommodation, General?” asked the courier.  “Yes, sir, I have decided to make my quarters here.”  “I am Mr. Corbin, sir,” said the soldier, “and I am very pleased.”

The lower room of the lodge, hung with trophies of the chase, was both his bedroom and his office; while a large tent, pitched on the grass outside, served as a messroom for his military family; and here for three long months, until near the end of March, he rested from the labour of his campaigns.  The Federal troops, on the snow-clad heights across the river, remained idle in their camps, slowly recovering from the effects of their defeat on the fields of Fredericksburg; the pickets had ceased to bicker; the gunboats had disappeared, and “all was quiet on the Rappahannock.”  Many of the senior officers in the Confederate army took advantage of the lull in operations to visit their homes; but, although his wife urged him to do the same, Jackson steadfastly refused to absent himself even for a few days from the front.  In November, to his unbounded delight, a daughter had been born to him.  “To a man of his extreme domesticity, and love for children,” says his wife, “this was a crowning happiness; and yet, with his great modesty and shrinking from publicity, he requested that he should not receive the announcement by telegraph, and when it came to him by letter he kept the glad tidings to himself—­leaving his staff and those around him in the camp to hear of it from others.  This was to him “a joy with which a stranger could not intermeddle,” and from which even his own hand could not lift the veil of sanctity.  His letters were full of longing to see his little Julia; for by this name, which had been his mother’s, he had desired her to be christened, saying, “My mother was mindful of me when I was a helpless, fatherless child, and I wish to commemorate her now."”

“How thankful I am,” he wrote, “to our kind Heavenly Father for having spared my precious wife and given us a little daughter!  I cannot tell how gratified I am, nor how much I wish I could be with you and see my two darlings.  But while this pleasure is denied me, I am thankful it is accorded to you to have the little pet, and I hope it may be a great deal of company and comfort to its mother.  Now, don’t exert yourself to write to me, for to know that you were exerting yourself to write would give me more pain than the letter would pleasure, so you must not do it.  But you must love your ESPOSO in the mean time...I expect you are just now made up with that baby.  Don’t you wish your husband wouldn’t claim any part of it, but let you have the sole ownership?  Don’t you regard it as the most precious little creature in the world?  Do not spoil it, and don’t let anybody tease it.  Don’t permit it to have a bad temper.  How I would love to see the darling little thing!  Give her many kisses from her father.