's batteries. The movements to be made on the day of that
battle were of the first magnitude. The movements of the retreat were
perilous to the whole army. The trains in use contributed something to
the success of those movements.

Many incidents are recorded of operators accompanying raiding parties
into the enemy's territory and tapping the telegraph-lines, sometimes
obtaining valuable information. One is related by the "Selma Rebel." The
operator at that place was called to his instrument by some one up the
Tennessee and Alabama Road, who desired information as to the number of
the forces and supplies at Coosa Bridge. After getting all the
information he could, regarding the location and strength of the Rebel
forces, he informed the Selma operator that he was attached to the
expedition under General Wilson, and that, at that particular time, he
was stationed with his instruments up a tree near Monticello, in the
hardest rain he ever saw! Permission being given, he sent a dispatch to
a young lady in Mobile, and another to a telegraph-operator in the Rebel
lines, telling him he loved him as much as before the war. After some
other conversation, the Yankee operator clambered down from the tree,
mounted his horse, and rode away.

FOOTNOTES:

[E] The Chinese Government has been informed by the Russian Ambassador
that the Russian portion of this line to Pekin will be completed by the
first of January, 1868.

THE FIELD OF GETTYSBURG.

In the month of August, 1865, I set out to visit some of the scenes of
the great conflict through which the country has lately passed.

On the twelfth, I reached Harrisburg,--a plain, prosaic town of brick
and wood, with nothing especially attractive about it, except its
broad-sheeted, shining river, flowing down from the Blue Ridge, around
wooded islands, and between pleasant shores.

It is in this region that the traveller from the North first meets with
indications of recent actual war. The Susquehanna, on the eastern shore
of which the city stands, forms the northern limit of Rebel military
operations. The "highwater mark of the Rebellion" is here: along these
banks its uttermost ripples died. The bluffs opposite the town are still
crested with the hastily constructed breastworks, on which the citizens
worked night and day in the pleasant month of June, 1863, throwing up,
as it were, a dike against the tide of invasion. These defences were of
no practical value. They were u