some two thousand men, and several pieces of artillery. Two miles from Washington a momentary stand was made, but the retreating troops soon fell back to the Capitol. Armstrong wished to occupy the two massive, detached wings of that building (the central rotunda' and porticoes' having not then been built), and to play the part of the British in Chew's house, at the battle of Germantown. But, if able to withstand an assault, how long could they hold out without provisions or water? 7. It was finally decided to abandon Washington, and to rally on the heights of Georgetown. Simultaneously with this abandonment of their homes by an army that retired but did not rally, fire was put at the navy-yard to a frigate on the stocks, to a sloop-of-war lately launched, and to several magazines of stores and provisions, for the destruction of which ample preparations had been made, and by the light of this fire, made lurid by a sudden thunder-gust, Ross, toward evening, advanced into Washington, then a straggling village of some eight thousand people, but for the moment almost deserted by the male part of the white inhabitants. 8. From Gallatin's late residence, one of the first considerable houses which the British column passed, a shot was fired which killed Ross's horse, and which was instantly revenged by putting fire to the house. After three or four British volleys at the Capitol the two detached wings were set on fire. The massive walls defied the flames, but all the interior was destroyed, with many valuable papers and the library of Congress-a piece of vandalism' alleged to be in revenge for the burning of the Parliament House at York. 9. An encampment was formed on Capitol Hill; put meanwhile a detachment marched along Pennsylvania Avenue to the president's house, of which the great hall had been converted into a military magazine, and before which some cannon had been placed. These cannon, however, had been carried off; and Mrs. Madison, having first stripped from its frame, and provided for the safety of, a valuable portrait of Washington, which ornamented the principal room, had also fled, with her plate and valuables loaded into a cart, obtained not without difficulty. 10. The President's house, and the offices of the Treasury and State Departments near by, were set on fire, Ross and Cockburn, who had forced themselves as unbidden guests upon a neighboring boarding-house woman, supping by the light of the blazing buildings. By the precaution of Monroe, the most valuable papers of the State Department had been previously removed; yet here too some important records were destroyed. The next morning the War Office was burned. The office of the National Intelligencer was ransacked', and the types thrown into the street, Cockburn himself presiding with gusto over this operation, thus revenging himself for the severe strictures of that journal on his proceedings in the Chesapeake. 11. The arsenal at Greenleaf's Point was also fired, as were some rope-walks near by. Several private houses were burned and some private warehouses broken open and plundered; but, in general, private property was respected, the plundering being less on the part of the British soldiers than of the inhabitants, black and white, who took advantage of the terror and confusion to help themselves. The only public buildings that escaped were the General Post-office and Patent Office, both under the same roof, of which the burning was delayed by the entreaties and remonstrances of the superintendents, and finally prevented by a tremendous tornado which passed over the city, and, for a while, completely dispersed the British column, the soldiers seeking refuge where they could, and several being buried in the ruins of the falling buildings. 12. A still more serious accident at Greenleaf's Point, where near a hundred British soldiers were killed or wounded by an accidental explosion, added to the anxiety of the British commander, otherwise ill enough at ease. He naturally imagined, though, as it happened, without any occasion for it, that an army of indignant citizen-soldiers was mustering on the heights of Georgetown. An attack was also apprehended from the south, to guard against which the Washington end of the Potomac bridge was set on fire by the British, while at the same moment a like precaution was taken at the Alexandria end to keep them from crossing. 13. No news came of the British ships in the Potomac, which Ross anxiously expected; and that same night, leaving his severely wounded behind, and his camp-fires burning, he silently retired, and, after a four days' uninterrupted march, arrived again at Benedict, where the troops were re-embarked, diminished, however, by a loss in killed, wounded, and deserters, of several hundred men. Yet while Ross, on his part, thus stealthily withdrew, so great was the terror which he left behind him, that some sixty British invalids, left in charge of the wounded, continued in undisturbed possession of Capitol Hill for more than twenty-four hours after his departure, till at last the citizens mustered courage to disarm them. 14. Two days after Ross had evacuated' the city, the British frigates, slowly sounding their way up the Potomac, arrived at Fort Washington. That fort, in spite of Winder's repeated warnings to Armstrong, was in a very unprovided state, and it was abandoned by the garrison after a short cannonade', during which their magazine was blown up. Boats were sent forward to sound and mark out the channel, and the same day that Ross's returning army reached Benedict, the British frigates anchored before Alexandria, which surrendered at discretion, yielding up as spoils and a ransom, twenty-one merchant vessels, sixteen thousand barrels of flour, one thousand hogsheads of tobacco, and a quantity of cotton and other merchandise. 15. Their object thus accomplished, the British frigates, with their captured vessels laden with the plunder of Alexandria, notwithstanding the efforts of Rodgers, Perry, and Porter, now without other naval employment, to harass them by means of barges, fire-ships, and cannon planted on the bank of the river, succeeded, by the exercise of skill and courage, in reaching the Chesapeake without loss. 16. Within less than a fortnight after the re-embarkation of Ross's army, the British fleet, spreading vast alarm as it ascended the Chesapeake, appeared off the Patapsco. A land ing was effected the next day at North Point, on the northern shore of that estuary", some eight miles up which was Fort McHenry, an open work, only two miles from Baltimore, commanding the entrance into the harbor, which found, however, its most effectual protection in the shallowness of the water. 17. The defense of the city rested with some ten thousand militia, including the city regiments, and several companies of volunteers from the neighboring counties of Pennsylvania. A corps, three thousand strong, had been thrown forward toward North Point; and as Ross and Cockburn, at the head of a reconnoitering party, approached the outposts of this advanced division, a skirmish ensued, in which Ross was killed. But the enemy's main body coming up, after an action of some spirit, they drove the advanced militia from the ground, with a loss on either side of between two and three hundred. 18. The British slept on the field, and, the next day, approached the city, which presented, however, a formidable appearance, the neighboring heights crowned by fieldworks, artillery, and masses of troops. The fleet, meanwhile, opened a tremendous cannonade on Fort McHenry; but, owing either to the shallowness of the water or out of apprehension of damage to themselves, at such a distance as to render their fire ineffectual. 19. It was under the excitement of this cannonade that the popular song of the "Star-Spangled Banner" was composed, the author being then on board the British fleet, whither he had gone to solicit the release of certain prisoners, and where he was detained pending the attack. An attempt was also made to land in boats, but that too failed; and that same night, the bombardment being still kept up, the British army, covered by rain and darkness, retired silently to their ships and re-embarked. [The last battle of this war was that fought at New Orleans by General Jackson, in which the British were defeated with very great loss (Jan. 8, 1815). Fifteen days be fore the battle a treaty of peace had been agreed upon by British and American commissioners at Ghent; but the news had not yet arrived.] Cotton and the Cotton-Gin.-Greeley. [The cultivation of cotton has had a most important bearing on very much of the social, political, and military history of the United States-being the foundation to a considerable extent of the material prosperity of the whole country. The invention of the cotton-gin by Eli Whitney, in 1792, gave so vast an impulse to that department of agricultural labor, that this event constitutes an epoch in the history of the country. The following interesting sketch is extracted from "The American Conflict," by Horace Greeley.] 1. THE plant known as cotton, whence the fibre of that name is mainly obtained, appears to be indigenous in most tropical and semi-tropical countries, having been found growing wild by Columbus in St. Domingo, and by later explorers throughout the region of the lower Mississippi and its tributaries. Cortez found it in use by the half-civilized Mexicans; and it has been rudely fabricated in Africa from time immemorial. 2. India, however, is the earliest known seat of the cotton manufacture, and here it long ago obtained the highest perfection possible prior to the application of steam, with complicated machinery, to its various processes; and hence it appears to have gradually extended westward through Persia and Arabia, until it attracted the attention of the Greeks, and was noticed by Herodotus, about 450 B.C., as the product of an Indian tree, and the staple of an extensive manufacture. Later Greek accounts confirm the impression that the tree or shrub variety was cultivated in India previously to the plant or annual now by far the more commonly grown. 3. The Romans began to use cotton fabrics before the time of Julius Cæsar, and the cotton-plant was grown in Sicily and along the northern coast of the Mediterranean as early as the tenth century. The culture, however, does not appear to have ever obtained a great importance in any portion of the world regarded by the Greeks and Romans as civilized, prior to its recent establishment in Egypt, in obedience to the despotic will of Ibrahim Pacha (ib'rah-heem pash-aw'). 4. In the British colonies now composing this country, the experiment of cotton-planting was tried as early as 1621; and, |