eral miles
long at a given point, fire as many wagons as their number admitted of
doing at once, then making a circuit and striking it again, leaving an
intermediate point untouched.

We did not suppose the troops actually engaged in the firing exceeded
three or four hundred well mounted men, but had a large body of
cavalry moving parallel with them in easy supporting distance. This
was a very effectual mode of throwing the march of the wagon train
into confusion, independent of the absolute destruction they caused.

The burning caissons, as we rode by, were anything but pleasant
neighbors, and were exploding right and left, but I do not recollect
of any of our men being hit by them.

We could hear the enemy ahead of us, as we pressed our tired horses
through the burning wagons and the scattered plunder which filled the
road, giving our own wagon-rats and skulkers a fine harvest of
plunder. Many of the wagons were untouched, but standing in the road
without horses, the teamsters at the first alarm taking them out and
making for the woods, coming back and taking their wagons again after
the stampede was over, sometimes to find them plundered by our own
cowardly skulkers, that I suppose belong to all armies. I have no
doubt Caesar had them in his tenth legion, and Xenophon in his famous
ten thousand.

So far the enemy, in carrying out his plan of attack, had kept in
motion; but after passing a large creek that crosses the road and runs
on by "Amelia Springs," they halted at an old field on the side of the
road and made a front. As the head of our column crossed the creek a
lady was standing in the mud by the road side with a soldier in a
"grey jacket." She had been with the ordnance train--the ambulance in
which she had been riding was taken, the horses carried off, and as we
closed up she was left as we found her. She was from Mississippi, and
had left Richmond with her friends in the "Artillery," and was much
more mad than scared, and she stood there in the mud (she was young
and pretty) and gesticulated as she told her story, making up a
picture striking and peculiar. There was no time to listen, but
promising to do our best to punish the aggressors, who had taken her
up and dropped her so unceremoniously in the mud, which was the amount
of the damage, and advising her to take shelter in a large white house
on the hill, we moved on to meet the party ahead, who, near enough
their reserve now for support, had halted