“General, I wish you would give me an order to search for my negro,” the visitor would commence.

“Have you lost your horse?” the General would ask, in reply.

“No, Sir.”

“Have you lost your mule?” the General would add.

“No, Sir,” the applicant for the order would answer, looking exceedingly puzzled at such unusual questions.

“Well, Sir, if you had lost your horse or your mule, would you come and ask me to neglect my duty to the Government for the purpose of assisting you to catch them?”

“Of course not,” the visitor would reply, with increasing astonishment.

“Then why should you expect me to employ myself in hunting after any other article of your property?”

And with this comforting and practical application of the Dred-Scott decision, the ex-owner of the fugitive slave would take his departure, a wiser, and, I doubt not, a sadder man.

During an interview between the General and the Reverend Doctor Leacock, (Rector of Grace Church in New Orleans, and one of the three Episcopal clergymen who refused to read the prayer for the President, and were therefore sent North as prisoners, under my charge,) in which the General urged upon the Doctor his views on the injurious influence of disloyalty in the pulpit, sustaining his argument by prolific quotations from Scripture, recited with an accuracy and appositeness that few theologians could exceed, the Doctor replied,—­

“But, General, your insisting upon the taking of the oath of allegiance is causing half of my church-members to perjure themselves.”

“If that is the case, I am glad I have not had the spiritual charge of your church for the last nine years,” (just the term of Dr. Leacock’s pastorate,) the General answered, promptly.

After a lengthy conversation, the Doctor finally asked,—­

“Well, General, are you going to shut up the churches?”

“No, Sir, I am more likely to shut up the ministers,” he replied.

To the casual observer this would appear but a brilliant repartee, while, in fact, it was significant as indicative of a sagacious policy.  Closing the churches would have given warrant to the charge of interference with the observances of religion.  So careful was the General to avoid anything of this nature, that, in every instance where a clergyman was removed from his church, the very next Sunday found his pulpit occupied by a loyal minister.

As a great many excellent Churchmen have misunderstood the cause of the arrest of clergymen in New Orleans, I think I must add a word of explanation.  The ministers so arrested were of the Episcopal denomination, in which the rector is required to read a liturgy prescribed by the General Convention.  In this liturgy occurs “a prayer for the President of the United States,” and its omission in their reading of the service was clearly an overt act of disloyalty, in that it was