in the poor hills they could only kill and burn,
and rob the stable and smoke-house. We were shown the scene of one
of these neighborhood vengeances. It is a low house at the side of
a ravine, down whose steep slope the beech forest steps persistently
erect, as if distrusting gravitation. Thirty Confederates had gathered
in that house at a country-side frolic, and the fiddle sang deep in
the night. The mountain girls are very pretty, having dark, opalescent
eyes, with a touch of gold in them at a side glance, slight, rather
too fragile figures, and the singular purity of complexion peculiar to
high lands.

The moon went down, and the music of the dance, the shuffle of feet on
the puncheon floor, died away into that deep murmurous chant, the hymn
of Nature in the forest. The falling water, sleeping in the dam or
toiling all day at the mill, gurgles like the tinkling of castanets.
Every vine and little leaf is a harp-string; every tiny blade of grass
flutes its singly inaudible treble; the rustling leaves, chirping
cricket, piping batrachian, the tuneful hum of insects that sleep
by day and wake by night, mingle and flow in the general harmony of
sound. The reeds and weeds and trunks of trees, like the great and
lesser pipes of an organ, thunder a low bass. The melancholy hoot
of the owl and the mellow complaint of the whippoorwill join in the
solemn diapason of the forest, filling the solitudes with grand,
stately marches. There are no sounds of Nature or art so true in
harmony as this ceaseless murmur of the American woods. So accordant
is it with the solemn majesty of form and color that the observer
fails to separate and distinguish it as an isolated part in the grand
order of Nature. He has felt an indescribable awe in the presence of
serene night and unbounded shadow, but to divide and distinguish
its constituent causes were as vain as in the contour and color of a
single tree to note the varied influence of rock, soil and river.

Over the little farm-house in the ravine in the fall of 1863 there
fell with the sinking moon these solemn dirges of the great dark
woods. The stars brightened their crowns till _Via Lactea_ shone a
highway of silver dust or as the shadow of that primeval river rolling
across the blue champaign of heaven. The depths of repose that follow
the enjoyment of the young irrigated their limbs, filling the sensuous
nerves and arteries with a delicious narcotism--a deep, quiet,
healthful sleep,