both sides a little
wrong, and the crops were really in a dreadful state. The negroes were
very ungrateful people and property should be held sacred by all
belligerents.

At this point he caught Miss Priscilla's eye, and was transfixed with
conscious guilt.

I had, meantime, been infringing upon Miss Bessie's feet,--very pretty
feet they were!--which expressive but not very refined method of
correspondence caused her to blush to the eyes. Miss Bell, noticing the
same, was determined to tell '_Henry_' at once, and I hoped in my heart
that she would set out for Manassas to further that purpose.

The door opened here, and the rubicund visage of Mr. Fogg appeared like
the head of the Medusa. He said that 'Captain' had ordered the blue roan
to be saddled and brought over to me, but I knew that this was a cunning
device on his part, to revisit the dwelling. Miss Bell, somehow caught
the idea that Fogg was enamored of her, and the poor fellow was
subjected to a volley of tender innuendos and languishing glances, that
by turn mortified and enraged him.

I bade the good people adieu at eight o'clock, promising to return for
dinner at five; and Miss Bessie accompanied me to the lane, where I took
leave of her with a secret whisper and a warm grasp of the hand. One of
her rings had somehow adhered to my finger, which Fogg remarked with a
bilious expression of countenance. I had no sooner got astride of the
blue roan than he darted off like the wind, and subjected me to great
terror, alternating to chagrin, when I turned back and beheld all the
young ladies waving their handkerchiefs. They evidently thought me an
unrivalled equestrian.

I rode to a picket post two miles from the mill, passing over the spot
where the Confederate soldier had fallen. The picket consisted of two
companies or one hundred and sixty men. Half of them were sitting around
a fire concealed in the woods, and the rest were scattered along the
edges of a piece of close timber. I climbed a lookout-tree by means of
cross-strips nailed to the trunk, and beheld from the summit a long
succession of hazy hills, valleys, and forests, with the Blue Ridge
Mountains bounding the distance, like some mighty monster, enclosing the
world in its coils. This was the country of the enemy, and a Lieutenant
obligingly pointed out to me the curling smoke of their pickets, a few
miles away. The cleft of Manassas was plainly visible, and I traced the
line of the Gap Railway to