and putting out of Lee's service
fifteen thousand of his choicest troops. And all this, General Sheridan
tells me, has cost him personally no more than eight hundred men, and
the service no more than fifteen hundred. Compare this with
Chancellorsville, Williamsburg, the Wilderness, Bull Run, and what shall
we say? The enemy must have lost in this fight three thousand in killed
and wounded.

The scene at Gravelly Run meeting-house at 8 and at 10 o'clock on
Saturday night, is one of the solemn contrasts of the war, and, I hope,
the last of them. A little frame church, planted among the pines, and
painted white, with cool, green window-shutters, holds at its foot a
gallery for the negroes, and at the head a varnished pulpit. I found
its pews moved to the green plain over the threshold, and on its bare
floors the screaming wounded. Blood ran in little rills across the
planks, and, human feet treading in them, had made indelible prints in
every direction; the pulpit-lamps were doing duty, not to shed holy
light upon holy pages, but to show the pale and dusty faces of the
beseeching; and as they moved in and out, the groans and curses of the
suffering replace the gush of peaceful hymns and the deep responses to
the preacher's prayers. Federal and Confederate lay together, the
bitterness of noon assuaged in the common tribulation of the night, and
all the while came in the dripping stretchers, to place in this golgotha
new recruits for death and sorrow. I asked the name of the church, but
no one knew any more than if it had been the site of some obsolete
heathen worship. At last, a grinning sergeant smacked his thumbs as if
the first idea of his life had occurred to him, and led me to the
pulpit. Beneath some torn blankets and rent officers' garments, rested
the hymn book and Bible, which he produced. Last Sunday these doled out
the praises of God, and the frightened congregation worshipped at their
dictation. Now they only served by their fly leaves to give me my
whereabouts, and said:--

_Presented to Gravelly Run Meeting House by the Ladies._

Over the portal, the scenes within were reiterated, except that the
greatness of a starry night replaced the close and terrible arena of the
church. Beneath the trees, where the Methodist circuit-rider had tied
his horse, and the urchins, daring class-meeting, had wandered away to
cast stones at the squirrels, and measure strength at vaulting and
running, the gashed and fevered la