f formed or half developed, the odd half of that thought
became impregnated, somehow, and straightway loomed up a goblin, or a
giant, or a grotesque something, that proceeded to torture me, like a
sort of Frankenstein, for having made it. Amid all these ghastly things,
there came beautiful glimpses of form, scene, and sensation, that
straightway changed to horrors. I remember, for example, that I was
gliding down a stream, where the boughs overhead were as shady as the
waters, and there were holy eyes that seemed to cool my fever; but
suddenly the stream became choked with corpses, that entangled their
dead limbs with mine, until I strangled and called aloud,--waking up
O'Ganlon and some reporters who proposed to give me morphine, that I
might not alarm the house.

How the poor soldiers fared, in the hot hospitals, I shudder to think;
but a more merciful decree spared my life, and kind treatment met me at
every hand. Otherwise, I believe, I should not be alive to-day to write
this story; for the fever had seized me in its severest form, and I had
almost tutored myself to look upon my end, far from my home and on the
very eve of my manhood.

O'Ganlon, at last, resolved to send me to White House, and started
thither one day, to obtain a berth for me upon a Sanitary steamer. The
next day an ambulance came to the door. I tried to sit up in bed, and
succeeded; I feebly robed myself and staggered to the stairs. I crawled,
rather than walked, to the hall below; but when I took a chair, and felt
the cool breeze from the oaks fanning my hair, I seemed to know that I
should get well.

"Boom! Boom! Boom!" pealed some cannon at the moment, and all the
windows shook with the concussion.

Directly we heard volleys of musketry, and then the camps were astir.
Horses went hither and thither; signal flags flashed to-and-fro; a
battery of the Reserve Artillery dashed down the lane.

I felt my strength coming back with the excitement; I even smiled feebly
as the guns thundered past.

"Take away your ambulance, old fellow," I said, "I shan't go home till I
see a battle."

CHAPTER XV.

TWO DAYS OF BATTLE.

The Confederates had been waiting two months for McClellan's advance.
Emboldened by his delay they had gathered the whole of their available
strength from remote Tennessee, from the Mississippi, and from the
coast, until, confident and powerful, they crossed Meadow Bridge on the
26th of June, 1862, and drove in our righ