he skeletons of men have
crumbled and become reabsorbed. I have seen them die like martyrs, when
the inquisitor, with his bloody lash, stood over them in the closing
pangs, and their last tremulous howl has almost moved to tears. Some of
the dwellings seemed to be occupied, but the tidiness of old times was
gone. The women seemed sunburnt and hardened by toil. They looked from
their thresholds upon the flying train, with their hair unbraided and
their garters ungyved,--not a negro left to till the fields, nor a son
or brother who had not travelled to the wars. They must be now hewers of
wood, and drawers of water, and the fingers whereon diamonds used to
sparkle, must clench the axe and the hoe.

At last we came to Bull Run, the dark and bloody ground where the first
grand armies fought and fled, and again to be consecrated by a baptism
of fire. The railway crossed the gorge upon a tall trestle bridge, and
for some distance the track followed the windings of the stream. A
black, deep, turgid current, flowing between gaunt hills, lined with
cedar and beech, crossed here and there by a ford, and vanishing, above
and below, in the windings of wood and rock; while directly beyond, lie
the wide plains of Manassas Junction, stretching in the far horizon, to
the undulating boundary of the Blue Ridge. As the Junction remains
to-day, the reader must imagine this splendid prospect, unbroken by
fences, dwellings, or fields, as if intended primevally to be a place
for the shock of columns, with redoubts to the left and right, and
fragments of stockades, dry rifle pits, unfinished or fallen
breastworks, and, close in the foreground, a medley of log huts for the
winter quartering of troops. The woods to the north mark the course of
Bull Run; a line of telegraph poles going westward points to Manassas
Gap; while the Junction proper is simply a point where two single track
railways unite, and a few frame "shanties" or sheds stand contiguous.
These are, for example, the "New York Head-quarters," kept by a person
with a hooked nose, who trades in cakes, lemonade, and (probably)
whiskey, of the brand called "rotgut;" or the "Union Stores," where a
person in semi-military dress deals in India-rubber overcoats,
underclothing, and boots. As the train halts, lads and negroes propose
to sell sandwiches to passengers, and soldiers ride up to take mail-bags
and bundles for imperceptible camps. In the distance some teams are
seen, and a solitary