d
countermarchings! how little he dreamed of Monitors and Merrimacks in
fierce _melee_ before his own little Hampton! how little, while he sowed
the wind that winter, he looked forward to the whirlwind-reaping,--of
which, indeed, he lived to hear only the first fierce sigh!

This valley of "Jeems River," and the three other valleys which radiate
like the four fingers of an open hand, and send their waters down into
the great conduit of Chesapeake Bay, which is the palm to these four
fingers, are in this very month of April, when I write, to become the
great battle-field of the continent. How strangely history repeats
itself, that, after eighty-one years, we should be looking out on
the map the Rapid Ann and the Chickahominy, and Williamsburg
and Fredericksburg, just as our fathers did in 1781,--that the
grandchildren of the men who marched under Lafayette from Baltimore to
Richmond, by the forced march which saved that infant capital from the
enemy, should be marching now, with a more Fabian tread, to save the
same Richmond from worse enemies! Does the Comte de Paris trace the
footprints of the young Marquis-General, who afterwards, among other
things, made his grandfather King? How strange it all is! While I wait
to know where Fabius is hidden, and where those army-corps of hundreds
of thousands are, which seem to have sunk into the ground at Warrenton
the other day, you and I, Reader, will familiarize ourselves with the
geography a little, by brushing the dust off those old campaigns.

They began by mere predatory excursions, which occupied, for a few weeks
at a time, the English forces which could be detached from New York. "We
march up and down the country," said Cornwallis, not overmuch
pleased, "stealing tobacco." As early as 1779, on the 8th of May, the
Raisonnable, sixty-four, five smaller ships of the English navy, and a
number of privateers acting as convoy to a cloud of transports, entered
the Capes of the Chesapeake. The Raisonnable drew too much water to go
farther than Hampton Roads: they probably did not know the channel
as well as the Merrimack's pilots do. But the rest of them went up
Elizabeth River, as one Pawnee did afterwards,--and there, at Gosport,
found the State's navy-yard, as the Pawnee found a nation's. There was
a vessel of war, unfinished, of twenty-eight guns, and many smaller
vessels,--and they burned them all. How exactly it begins as the history
of another war begins! Different branche