d to be sent from camp to
replace them, while many more were all but ruined. Spiltdorph and I
walked out to the place the next day and found it an almost perpendicular
rock, though two hundred men and a company of miners had been at work
for near a week trying to make it passable. We could see the detachment
slowly cutting its way through the valley below, and I reflected gloomily
that, at so slow a rate, the summer would be well-nigh gone before the
army could reach its destination. Indeed, I believe it would have gone to
pieces on this first spur of the Alleghenies, had not Lieutenant
Spendelow, of the seamen, discovered a valley round its foot.
Accordingly, a party of a hundred men was ordered out to clear a road
there, and worked to such purpose that at the end of two days an
extremely good one was completed, falling into the road made by Major
Campbell about a mile beyond the mountain.

On the seventh, Sir Peter Halket and the Forty-Eighth marched, in the
midst of a heavy storm, and at daybreak the next day it was our turn.
Under command of Lieutenant-Colonel Burton, all of the independent
companies and rangers left the camp, not, indeed, making so brilliant an
appearance as the regulars,--who stood on either side and laughed at
us,--but with a clearer comprehension of the work before us and a hearty
readiness to do it. It was not until the tenth that the third division
under Colonel Dunbar left the fort, and finally, on the eleventh, the
general joined the army where it had assembled at Spendelow camp, five
miles from the start.

Our tent that night was a gloomy place, for I think most of us, for the
first time since the campaign opened, began to doubt its ultimate
success. We soon finished with the food, and were smoking in gloomy
silence, when Peyronie came in, and after a glance around at our faces,
broke into a laugh.

"Ma foi!" he cried, "I thought I had chanced upon a meeting of our
Philadelphia friends,--they of the broad hats and sober coats,--and yet I
had never before known them to go to war."

"Do you call this going to war?" cried Waggoner. "I'm cursed if I do!"

Peyronie laughed louder than ever, and Waggoner motioned him to the pipes
and tobacco.

"By God, Peyronie!" he said. "I believe you would laugh in the face of
the devil."

Peyronie filled his pipe, chuckling to himself the while, and when he had
got it to drawing nicely, settled himself upon a stool.

"Why, to tell the truth," said h