Four Years in Rebel Capitals

Fortunate, indeed, is the reader who takes up a volume without preface; of which the persons are left to enact their own drama and the author does not come before the curtain, like the chorus of Greek tragedy, to speak for them. But, in printing the pages that follow, it may seem needful to ask that they be taken for what they are; simple sketches of the inner life of "Rebeldom"--behind its Chinese wall of wood and steel--during those unexampled four years of its existence. Written almost immediately after the war, from notes and recollections gathered during its most trying scenes, these papers are now revised, condensed...