g a very long
distance from our own men. For the next hundred years Gettysburg will be
rich in legends and traditions of the battle. I rode through the
Cemetery on "Cemetery Hill." How these quiet sleepers must have been
astounded in their graves when the twenty pound Parrott guns thundered
above them and the solid shot crushed their gravestones! The flowers,
roses and creeping vines that pious hands had planted to bloom and shed
their odors over the ashes of dead ones gone, were trampled upon the
ground and black with the cannon's soot. A dead horse lay by the marble
shaft, and over it the marble finger pointed to the sky. The marble lamb
that had slept its white sleep on the grave of a child, now lies
blackened upon a broken gun-carriage. Such are the incongruities and
jumblings of battle.

I looked away to _the group of trees_--the Rebel gunners know what ones
I mean, and so do the survivors of Pickett's division--and a strange
fascination led me thither. How thick are the marks of battle as I
approach--the graves of the men of the 3d division of the 2d corps; the
splintered oaks, the scattered horses--seventy-one dead horses were on a
spot some fifty yards square near the position of Woodruff's battery,
and where he fell.

I stood solitary upon the crest by "_the trees_" where, less than three
days ago, I had stood before; but now how changed is all the eye
beholds. Do these thick mounds cover the fiery hearts that in the battle
rage swept the crest and stormed the wall? I read their names--them,
alas, I do not know--but I see the regiments marked on their frail
monuments--"20th Mass. Vols.," "69 P. V.," "1st Minn. Vols.," and the
rest--they are all represented, and as they fought commingled here. So I
am not alone. These, my brethren of the fight, are with me. Sleep, noble
brave! The foe shall not desecrate your sleep. Yonder thick trenches
will hold them. As long as patriotism is a virtue, and treason a crime
your deeds have made this crest, your resting place, hallowed ground!

But I have seen and said enough of this battle. The unfortunate wounding
of my General so early in the action of the 3d of July, leaving
important duties which, in the unreasoning excitement of the moment I in
part assumed, enabled me to do for the successful issue, something which
under other circumstances would not have fallen to my rank or place.
Deploring the occasion for taking away from the division in that moment
of its need its