ansversely. For the first time I saw the
two colors fairly alternate on the military chessboard; it had been the
object of much labor and many dreams, and I liked the pattern at last.
Nothing was said about the novel fact by anybody,--it all seemed to come
as matter-of-course; there appeared to be no mutual distrust among the
men, and as for the officers, doubtless "each crow thought its own young
the whitest,"--I certainly did, although doing full justice to the eager
courage of the Northern portion of my command. Especially I watched with
pleasure the fresh delight of the Maine men, who had not, like the rest,
been previously in action, and who strode rapidly on with their long
legs, irresistibly recalling, as their gaunt, athletic frames and
sunburnt faces appeared here and there among the pines, the lumber
regions of their native State, with which I was not unfamiliar.

We passed through a former camp of the Rebels, from which everything
had been lately removed; but when the utmost permitted limits of our
reconnoissance were reached, there were still no signs of any other
camp, and the Rebel cavalry still kept provokingly before us. Their
evident object was to lure us on to their own stronghold, and had we
fallen into the trap, it would perhaps have resembled, on a smaller
scale, the Olustee of the following year. With a good deal of
reluctance, however, I caused the recall to be sounded, and, after a
slight halt, we began to retrace our steps.

Straining our eyes to look along the reach of level railway which
stretched away through the pine barren, we began to see certain ominous
puffs of smoke, which might indeed proceed from some fire in the woods,
but were at once set down by the men as coming from the mysterious
locomotive battery which the Rebels were said to have constructed.
Gradually the smoke grew denser, and appeared to be moving up along
the track, keeping pace with our motion, and about two miles distant.
I watched it steadily through a field-glass from our own slowly moving
battery: it seemed to move when we moved and to halt when we halted.
Sometimes in the dun smoke I caught a glimpse of something blacker,
raised high in the air like the threatening head of some great gliding
serpent. Suddenly there came a sharp puff of lighter smoke that seemed
like a forked tongue, and then a hollow report, and we could see a great
black projectile hurled into the air, and falling a quarter of a mile
away from us,