There was a body of Virginian gentlemen at the Richmond station, which is some way from the town, to welcome the Duke, and carriages were awaiting the train. After the usual introductions our guides, philosophers, and friends drove us round and did the honours of their capital with much kindness and courtesy. The weather was disagreeable, but it was certainly exceptional--there was a grey sunless sky; bitter blasts swept the dusty roads, raising clouds of fiery red sand from the brickfield soil on which the city is built, and quite destroying previous impressions of the climate of Virginia. At Richmond itself there is not very much to be seen by an unsympathetic stranger, but for Americans of every stripe of political opinion the scene of such important events must be intensely interesting. We found the traces of the works thrown around the Confederate capital had nearly disappeared. A remnant of some of the earthworks may still be seen up the river, and in the Cemetery, marked by a pyramid of stone, lie Jeb Stewart and many a valiant comrade. The cemeteries, which form a melancholy addition to the interesting spots around the Virginian capital, are filled with the remains of the victims of that long and deadly struggle. Petersburg, from which Lee, after his brilliant and skilful defence, was obliged to fall back to the Court-House of Appomatox, where he surrendered, was too far for us to visit, but we saw much that was of interest in our hurried drive--the house in which ex-President Davis lived, the church in which he was at prayers when the news of Lee's abandonment of Petersburg was brought to him, the Tredegar Foundry where the Confederate guns were made, the Capitol which resounded to the ardent declamation of the statesmen who made Virginia illustrious, and to the eloquence of those who shared her evil fortunes. We saw the abodes of despairing or hopeful multitudes, of the sickness unto death, and of the death which is a release, the ruinous brick walls of Libby Prison, the Hospital, and we thought that it would be just as well to level the ugly piles to the ground. Later in the day we met one who had charge of the Federal prisoners, of whom some 75,000, he told us, had been under his care, a grave and courteous man, deeply imbued with the teaching of the fathers of the Constitution, who as a Judge believed that Heaven, in siding with _les gros bataillons_, had not done justice to a holy cause, and he made a remark which illustrated, I think, the spirit of many of those who accept the actual results of the contest as inevitable if not equitable. "At the outset of the war," he said, "all the prisoners were either Yankees or Irish; at the end of it the great proportion of the prisoners were Dutchmen--Germans, who could not understand a word of English, and who had come to fight for pay." The Irish ceased to enlist as soon as the Federal Government let loose and enlisted the negroes, and the war, he explained, was carried on by the foreign immigration from Europe. The Judge, indeed, held that if the North and the South had been left to fight it out the latter must have won. But what avail these speculations now? Let the dead bury their dead, and let the victors suffer the living to dwell in peace. Here are men, Southerners and Northerners, living in the same land, who have stood face to face in battle, and would live all the better if the sleeping dogs of war were let lie in peace. We were shown on our way to Richmond the humble shanty in which Stonewall Jackson breathed his last, and in the grounds of the Capitol itself the statue raised by admiring strangers to the memory of the Virginian Havelock--and it cannot be held, I think, that such a memorial as the latter can be classed with the celebration of the defeats of the Southern armies by permanent military organisations. He would be a very thin-skinned and ridiculous sort of Briton who took umbrage at the forthcoming festival at Yorktown which is to commemorate the surrender of Cornwallis to Rochambeau and Washington; but the Americans would have good reason to be moved to anger if we in England were to appoint a day for the glorification of the capture and destruction of Washington in the last war, an act of which none of us feel very proud, and of which most Englishmen are utterly ignorant, even though they may have heard of New Orleans, Lundy's Lane, and Plattsburg.