h position. Stopping at times
to chat with brother officers, at last I reached the meadow whence I had
been driven the previous evening. I looked for my nag in vain. One
soldier told me that he had seen him at daylight limping along the high
road; but after sundry wild-goose chases, I gave up the idea of
recovering him.

At last I passed the outlying batteries, with their black muzzles
scanning the battle-ground, and ascending the clover field, came upon
the site of the battery which had so discomfited us the previous night.
A signal vengeance had overtaken it. Some splinters of wheel and an
overturned caisson, with eight horses lying in a group,--their hoofs
extended like index boards, their necks elongated along the ground, and
their bodies swollen--were the results of a single shell trained upon
the battery by a cool artillerist. Beyond, the road and fields were
strown with knapsacks, haversacks, jackets, canteens, cartridge-boxes,
shoes, bayonets, knives, buttons, belts, blankets, girths, and sabres.
Now and then a mule or a horse lay at the roadside, with the clay
saturated beneath him; and some of the tree-tops, in the depth of the
woods, were scarred, split, and barked, as if the lightning had blasted
them. Now passing a disabled wagon, now marking a dropped horseshoe, now
turning a capsized ambulance, now regarding a perfect wilderness of old
clothes, we emerged from the timber at last, and came to the place where
I had slept on the eve of the battle. A hurricane had apparently swept
the country here, and the fences had been transported bodily. Sometimes
the ground looked, for limited areas, as if there had been a rain of
kindling-wood; and there were furrows in the clay, like those made by
some great mole which had ploughed into the bowels of the earth. All the
tree boles were pierced and perforated, and boughs had been severed so
that they littered the way. Cedar Creek ran merrily across what had been
the road,--the waters limpid and cool as before,--and when I passed
beyond, I entered the region of dead men. Some poisonous Upas had
seemingly grown here, so that adventurers were prostrated by its
exhalations. A tributary rivulet formed with the creek a triangular
enclosure of ground, where most of the Federals had fallen. To the left
of the road stood a cornfield; to the right a stubble-field, dotted with
stone heaps: deep woods formed the background to these, and
scrub-timber, irregularly disposed, the foregr