staff, Mrs. Gage, Miss Thompson, and our party were the guests. Dinner over, we sat up in the General's parlor and talked, I with Mrs. Gage, the General and Captains amusing themselves decking out Nelly and Tilly with scarfs and swords. I observed that the General gave his yellow scarf to Tilly, his red one to Nelly, thus letting Miss Thompson rank Nelly. They retained these scarfs all the evening.

I wore my blue silk dress and it looked well, but not so pretty as Miss Louise Kellogg's, who came with other guests to the dance. This was opened by the General and myself in a cotillion — neither of us dancing the Lancers. I found I had not forgotten, and I enjoyed it exceedingly.

(Letters from Port Royal)The firstletter of 1863 gives an account of the ceremonies with which the Sea Islands celebrated the Emancipation Proclamation. The place was the Smith Plantation, on Port Royal Island, where the First South Carolina had its camp.

From Harriet WareJan. 1,1863. We started [from R.'s] at ten o'clock with four oarsmen, under a cloudless sky, which remained undimmed through the day. The men sang and we sang, as we wound our way through the marshbound creek, reaching the Smith Plantation just as the Flora was landing her first load from the Ferry. We followed the crowd up to the grove of live-oaks with their moss trimmings, which did not look so dreary under a winter's sun, but very summer-like and beautiful. The regiment, which had been drawn up at the