are lying low for us, and presently we shall look into the barrels of a row of rifles and receive their deadly volley at this short range!" For an instant the regiment as one man recoiled and faltered. Then a serjeant from one of the centre companies stepped forth. I can see him now, a handsome, fair-haired young fellow. With cool and quiet voice he called, "Boys, let's see what's inside of this thing!" and straight up the slope of the yellow mound he started and the regiment followed with a cheer. We found a deserted fort. It had been outflanked by the regiment on our right. They received from another side the volley which we narrowly missed and it laid low more than a hundred of their men. Away to our right, all along the line the charge had been successful and the heights of Fredericksburg were won.

Is there any intoxication like the joy of victory? For the moment men forget everything else: fatigue, thirst, wounds, dead and suffering comrades, the parting shots of fleeing foe. But it is a short-lived joy; at least ours was, for the victory had been costly and there were sad gaps in the ranks of all the regiments as we reformed on the crest of the hills. Moreover, our work was but begun. The Sixth Corps had been ordered to join Hooker by cutting a road for itself through Lee's army.

Regaining our knapsacks, we were speedily on the march, the First Division now in the advance, as ours, the Second, had been in the morning. Ghastly sights met us as we passed through the old town where the Light Division had charged; almost every house showed marks of shot or shell, and here and there on the sidewalks or at street corners, in the hot sunshine lay the dead bodies of poor heroes whose last battle was fought. I remember how almost always some comrade's friendly hand had pulled the corner of a blanket over their swollen and blackening faces. On we went leaving the town behind, marching along a well-made high-road into a country of small fields set in the midst of dense and scrubby pine woods and the afternoon was wearing away when suddenly, from the direction in which we were going, out of those mysterious thickets of pine came the Song.

This time there was no prelude of cracking rifles and whispering bullets; but, as though some mighty hand smote at once all the bass notes of a great organ the cannonade roared out, swelling louder and louder all along our front. Soon we reached an open field where an ammunition train was parked and here we were halted to rest and replenish our cartridge boxes while the fierce roar of the Song still thundered until, as we were thus busied, there was a hush—one of those instant and ominous silences which smite the heart more loudly than any sound: the Song did not die away, it stopped. And then, after a breathless moment a new movement of the symphony began. Like the pattering roar of rain after thunder, or like the long roll from a hundred tenor drums it swept along and swelled out until the woods responsive seemed to vibrate to its rattle. It was the file-fire of the line of battle. We could see nothing, not even the smoke through the dense forest; we could only listen. "Hark!" said an old soldier standing near me. "D' ye hear that? Bullets this time: Them's the little things that kills!"

But swiftly now we are on the march again, pressing toward the sound of the Song. And soon the wounded begin to appear, making their way past us toward the rear by the side paths of the road on which we march; every moment their numbers increase until we find ourselves marching between two ghastly lines of wounded men: only a detachment from the growing company of the victims of the Song, only those who can walk. But there were gruesome sights in that procession of pain. Here a man holding up his hand across which a bullet has ploughed a bloody track; there one with a ragged hole through his cheek; then an officer leaning on two other men, both wounded, the ashy hue of death on his face and the blood streaming from his breast. This is no picture of the imagination. I am telling things that I saw, things that burned themselves into my memory; and I remember that every one of those wounded men whether his hurt were great or small, was pale as death and wore a fixed expression, not of terror but of stony despair. They all walked slowly and wearily and if you asked one of them, "How is the battle going?" you got the invariable answer, "Our regiment is all cut to pieces;" and they said it in a tone of tired reproach as though you ought to know and had insulted them by asking, or else with an inflection which meant, "Presently you will catch it yourselves." It was a procession of spectres and cold cheer it furnished for us, hurrying forward toward the ever-nearing and now frightful tones of the Song; yet I think the emotion uppermost in our minds was not precisely fear but a sort of awful curiosity: we burned to see as well as hear the dreadful mystery beyond the pines; the Song seemed to come from a deadly but luring siren whose call we must obey.

But night was now coming fast and all the ways began to darken; and just when we expected to emerge into the heart of battle, as though an invisible conductor had suddenly raised his wand, as abruptly as it began the Song ceased and there was a great silence. We had heard though we had not seen the fight at Salem Church, a bitterly contested but drawn battle in which many hundreds of brave men fell. The Sixth Corps had begun to feel the weight of Lee's army.

The night which followed was one of those sweet nights of early summer when earth seems not to sleep, but to unloosen her bands and lie down to play with her merry brood of new-born children. Yet there was strange mystery abroad: everywhere a weird sound—was it of sorrow or of foreboding, nature's wail or nature's warning? It seemed to mingle both as the May moon shone down on those who died to-day and those who were to die to-morrow. I have often heard the spirit-like cry of the whippoorwill, but never as I heard it that night. It came from every tree and bush, from every side and all around until it pervaded all the air. Perhaps I thought more of it because I was not one of the fortunate ones who could sleep undisturbed. The first serjeant was among the missing, the second serjeant had to take his duty and I was obliged to act as "commissary," rouse a detail of sleepy and unwilling men, stumble through the fields with them until we found the supply train and bring back a load of rations for the company; but I never hear a whippoorwill that I do not think of that night.

In the morning we found a little brook near our lines; it was a welcome friend; it offered us water for coffee and for a much-needed wash and its banks were speedily lined with chaffing, gossiping, half-dressed soldiers. But the coffee-pots had scarce begun to send their grateful fragrance through the lines when that monotonously awful Song broke forth again. From the hills in our rear which we had victoriously assaulted yesterday, came screaming shells from an enemy's battery. Our breakfast was cut short: "Fall in, men!" "Attention, battalion!" The orders flew from rank to rank, and soon the lines were formed. A pleasant Virginia mansion stood on rising ground near by, and the pretty lawn in front offered a good position which was speedily taken by one of our batteries, the horses ruthlessly trampling down the flowers and shrubbery; and there before that peaceful home the war-dogs began their baying answer to the hostile shots. Meantime the regiments were in motion and as we crossed a field below the house its fleeing occupants went by us. I was near enough to see them closely: an intelligent-looking man with his fair, pale wife and two little children. They were friends of our foes, but every heart ached for them and we let them pass in respectful silence. I noticed that the man's face bore the same set, despairing expression that I had seen the day before in the faces of the wounded men. A new and horrid discord sounded in the Song as that sad little company went by.

The firing soon ceased; but all the