the dirt road beside it was in places scarcely
better. The back of the seat was cruel, notwithstanding the corn-stalks.
But by means of much persuasion, enforced by a good whip, Elijah kept
the old horse jogging on. Oak-trees, loaded with acorns, grew beside the
road. Black walnuts, already beginning to lose their leaves, hung their
delicate balls in the clear light over our heads. Poke-weeds dark with
ripening berries, wild grapes festooning bush and tree, sumachs
thrusting up through the foliage their sanguinary spears,
persimmon-trees, gum-trees, red cedars with their bluish-green clusters,
chestnut-oaks, and chincapins, adorned the wild wayside.

So we approached Chancellorsville, twelve miles from Fredericksburg.
Elijah was raised in that region, and knew everybody.

"Many a frolic have I had runnin' the deer through these woods! Soon as
the dogs started one, he'd put fo' the river, cross, take a turn on t'
other side, and it wouldn't be an hour 'fo'e he'd be back ag'in. Man I
lived with used to have a mare that was trained to hunt; if she was in
the field and heard the dogs, she'd whirl her tail up on her back, lope
the fences, and go spang to the United States Ford, git thar 'fo'e the
dogs would, and hunt as well without a rider as with one."

But since then a far different kind of hunting, a richer blood than the
deer's, and other sounds than the exciting yelp of the dogs, had
rendered that region famous.

"Hyer we come to the Chancellorsville farm. Many a poo' soldier's
knapsack was emptied of his clothes, after the battle, along this road!"
said Elijah, remembering last winter's business with his mule.

The road runs through a large open field bounded by woods. The marks of
hard fighting were visible from afar off. A growth of saplings edging
the woods on the south had been killed by volleys of musketry: it looked
like thickets of bean-poles. The ground everywhere, in the field and in
the woods, was strewed with mementoes of the battle,--rotting knapsacks
and haversacks, battered canteens and tin cups, and fragments of
clothing which Elijah's customers had not deemed it worth the while to
pick up. On each side of the road were breastworks and rifle-pits
extending into the woods. The clearing, once a well-fenced farm of
grain-fields and clover-lots, was now a dreary and deserted common. Of
the Chancellorsville House, formerly a large brick tavern, only the
half-fallen walls and chimney-stacks remained. Here