rked
by great agony, and during much of the time I was quite blind. I turned
off, at Gaines's Mill, to rest at Captain Kingwalt's; but the old
gentleman was in the grip of the ague, and I forebore to trouble him
with a statement of my grievances. Skyhiski made me a cup of tea, which
I could not drink, and Fogg made me lie on his "poncho." It was like old
times come back, to hear them all speak cheerfully, and the man Clover
said that if there "warn't" a battle soon, he knew what he'd do, he
did! he'd go home, straight as a buck!

"Becoz," said the man Clover, flourishing his hands, "I volunteered to
fight. To _fight_, sir! not to dig and drive team. Here we air, sir,
stuck in the mud, burnin' with fever, livin' on hardtack. And thair's
Richmond! Just thair! You can chuck a stone at it, if you mind to. A'ter
awhile them rebbils'll pop out, and fix us. Why ain't we led up,
sa-a-y?"

The man Clover represented common sentiment among the troops at this
time; but I told him that in all probability he would soon be gratified
with a battle. My prediction was so far correct, that when I met the man
Clover on the James River, a week afterward, he said, with a rueful
countenance--

"Sa-a-a-y! It never rains but it pours, does it?"

As I rode from the camp of the Pennsylvania Reserves, at noon, on the
21st of June, I seemed to feel a gloomy premonition of the calamities
that were shortly to fall upon the "Army of the Potomac." I passed in
front of Hogan house; through the wood above the mill; along Gaines's
Lane, between his mansion and his barn; across a creek, tributary to the
Chickahominy; and up the ploughed hills by a military road, toward
Grapevine Bridge. Lieutenant-Colonel Heath, of the Fifth Maine Regiment,
was riding with me, and we stopped at the tip of an elevated field to
look back upon the scene. I was very sick and weary, and I lay my head
upon the mane of my nag, while Heath threw a leg across his saddle
pommel, and straightened his slight figure; we both gazed earnestly.

The river lay in the hollow or ravine to the left, and a few farm-houses
sat among the trees on the hill-tops beyond. A battery was planted at
each house, and we could see the lines of red-clay parapets marking the
sites. From the roof of one of the houses floated a speck of
canvas,--the revolutionary flag. A horseman or two moved shadow-like
across a slope of yellow grain. Before and back the woods belted the
landscape, and some pickets of