so blue and cloudless, the air so still, and all nature lay
smiling so serene and fair in the glad sunshine--it was a day such as
that whereon the Creator may have looked upon the new-born earth, and
'saw everything that He had made, and, behold, it was very good;' a day
as if chosen from all its fellows and consecrated to a hallowed quiet,
the blessedness of prayer and thanksgiving, praise and worship.

Hardly a man in our division, I believe, but awoke that morning with a
happy consciousness of long hours that this day were to be his own, and
a clear idea of just how he should improve them. My programme was the
general one, and simple enough it was. First, of course, to make ready
for inspection, and, that ceremony well gotten through with, to enact
the familiar performance of every man his own washerwoman and
seamstress: the remainder of the day should be devoted to the soldier's
sacred delight of correspondence--to completing a letter to Wynne, begun
back at Columbia, and writing home. Out by the smouldering fire, where
the cooks of our mess had prepared breakfast nearly two hours before, I
was busily at work furbishing with the new dust-fine ashes the brasses
of my accoutrements, when the boom of cannon burst on the air, rolling
heavily from away to the southward up from what we knew must be the
neighborhood of the camps at Pittsburg Landing. It was after seven
o'clock. The sun was mounting over the scrubby oak copse behind our
camp, and the day grew warm apace. Another and still another explosion
followed in quick succession.

What could it mean? Only the gunboats, some suggested, shelling
guerillas out of the woods somewhere along the river bank. Impossible;
too near, too far to the right, for that. It could hardly be artillery
practice merely; for to-day was the Sabbath. And the youngest soldier
among us knew better than to give those rapid, furious volleys the
interpretation of a formal military salute. Could it really be--battle?

Every man almost was out and listening intently. Louder and fiercer the
reports came, though still irregular. Now and then, in the intervals, a
low, quick crepitation reached us, an undertone that no soldier could
fail to recognize as distant musketry. Ominous sounds they were,
portending--what? What, indeed, if not actual battle? If a battle, then
certainly an attack by the enemy. Were our comrades up at the Landing
prepared for it?

The first cannon had been fired scarcely ten m