they loved the place: do you think they will know it?"

I did not know how to reply. They retained my hands, and for a moment
none of us spoke.

"Don't think, Mr. Townsend," said the chivalrous old gentleman again,
"that we like you less because some of your country people have stripped
us. Mother, where is the gruel you made for him?"

The good lady, expecting my return, had prepared some nourishing chicken
soup, and directly she produced it. I think she took heart when I ate so
plentifully, and we all spoke hopefully again. Their kindness so touched
me, that as the evening came quietly about us, lengthening the shadows,
and I knew that I must depart, I took both their hands again, doubtful
what to say.

"My friends,--may I say, almost my parents? for you have been as
kind,--good by! In a day, perhaps, you will be with your children again.
Richmond will be open to you. You may freely go and come. Be comforted
by these assurances. And when the war is over,--God speed the time!--we
may see each other under happier auspices."

"Good by!" said Mr. Michie; "if I have a house at that time, you shall
be welcome."

"Good by," said Mrs. Michie; "tell your mother that a strange lady in
Virginia took good care of you when you were sick."

I waved a final adieu, vaulted down the lane, and the wood gathered its
solemn darkness about me. When I emerged upon Savage's fields, a
succession of terrible explosions shook the night, and then the flames
flared up, at points along the railroad. They were blowing up the
locomotives and burning the cars. At the same hour, though I could not
see it, White House was wrapped in fire, and the last sutler, teamster,
and cavalry-man had disappeared from the shores of the Pamunkey.

I tossed through another night of fever, in the captain's tent of the
Sturgis Rifles,--McClellan's body guard. And somehow, again, I dreamed
fitfully of the unburied corpses on the field of Gaines's Mill.

CHAPTER XVII.

A BATTLE SUNDAY.

In the dim of the morning of our Lord's Sabbath, the twenty-ninth of
June, 1862, I sat in my saddle at Savage's. The gloom was very
cheerless. A feeling of hopeless vagabondism oppressed me. I remembered
the Disinherited Knight, the Wandering Jew, Robinson Crusoe, and other
poor errants in the wide world, and wondered if any of them ever looked
so ruefully as I, when the last wagon of the Grand Army disappeared
through the shadow.

The tent had been taken down at m