any accident occurs, shoot the cursed Yankee.”  Little was a Northern man.  Upon the threat thus enforced, the engineer seemed to yield, and prepared to start the train.  As if having forgotten an important matter, he said, hastily, “Oh, I must have some oil,” and stepping down off the locomotive, walked toward the engine-house.  When he was about twenty yards from the cars, the guard thought of their duty, and one of them followed Little, and called upon him to halt; but in a moment he was behind the machine-shop, and off in the dense woods, in the deep darkness.  The commotion soon brought the colonel and a crowd, and while they were cursing each other all round, the firemen and most of the brakemen slipped off, and here we were with no means of getting ahead.  All this time I had stood on the engine, rather enjoying the melee, but taking no part in it, when Colonel Williams, turning to me, said,

“Can not you run the engine?”

I replied, “No, sir.”

“You have been on it as we came down.”

“Yes, sir, as a matter of curiosity.”

“Don’t you know how to start and stop her!”

“Yes, that is easy enough; but if any thing should go wrong I could not adjust it.”

“No difference, no difference, sir; I must be at Bowling Green to-morrow, and you must put us through.”

I looked him in the eye, and said calmly, “Colonel Williams, I can not voluntarily take the responsibility of managing a train with a thousand men aboard, nor will I be forced to do it under a guard who know nothing about an engine, and who would be as likely to shoot me for doing my duty as failing to do it; but if you will find among the men a fireman, send away this guard, and come yourself on the locomotive, I will do the best I can.”

And now commenced my apprenticeship to running a Secession railroad train, with a Rebel regiment on board.  The engine behaved admirably, and I began to feel quite safe, for she obeyed every command I gave her, as if she acknowledged me her rightful lord.

I could not but be startled at the position in which I was placed, holding in my hand the lives of more than a thousand men, running a train of twenty-five cars over a road I had never seen, running without a head-light, and the road so dark that I could only see a rod or two ahead, and, to crown all, knowing almost nothing of the business.  Of course I ran slowly, about ten miles an hour, and never took my hand off the throttle or my eye from the road.  The colonel at length grew confident, and almost confidential, and did most of the talking, as I had no time for conversation.  When we had run about thirty miles, and every thing was going well, Colonel Williams concluded to walk back, on the top of the box-cars, to a passenger car which was attached to the rear of the train and occupied by the officers.