ss. About
the base there are thick forests and swamps, and Turkey Creek goes
winding, winding to the James. You see the James--the wide, old, yellow
river, with the birds going screaming overhead. There were no gunboats
on it that day, no Monitors, or Galenas, or Maritanzas, and if you'd
told us up there on Malvern Hill that the next time we climbed it--! At
Westover, after supper, they told Indian stories and stories of
Tarleton's troopers, and in the night we listened for the tap of Evelyn
Byrd's slipper on the stair. We said we heard it--anyhow, we didn't hear
gunboats and three hundred thirty-two pounders!"

"'When only Beauty's eyes did rake us fore and aft,
When only Beaux used powder, and Cupid's was the shaft--'"

sang Edward,

"'Most fatal was the war and pleasant to be slain--'"

_Malvern Hill_, beat out the marching feet. _Malvern Hill. Malvern Hill.
Malvern Hill._

There was a deep wood, out from which ran like spurs shallow ravines,
clad with briar and bush and young trees; there was a stretch of rail
fence; and there was a wheat field, where the grain stood in shocks.
Because of the smoke, however, nothing could be seen plainly; and
because of the most awful sound, few orders were distinctly heard.
Evidently officers were shouting; in the rents of the veil one saw waved
arms, open mouths, gesticulations with swords. But the loud-mouthed guns
spoke by the score, and the blast bore the human voice away. The
regiment in which was Edward Cary divined an order and ceased firing,
lying flat in sedge and sassafras, while a brigade from the rear roared
by. Edward looked at his fingers. "Barrel burn them?" asked a neighbour.
"Reckon they use red-hot muskets in hell? Wish you could see your lips,
Edward! Round black O. Biting cartridges for a living--and it used to be
when you read Plutarch that you were all for the peaceful heroes! You
haven't a lady-love that would look at you now!

"'Take, oh, take those lips away
That so blackly are enshrined--'

Here comes a lamp-post--a lamp-post--a lamp-post!"

The gunboats on the river threw the "lamp-posts." The long and horrible
shells arrived with a noise that was indescribable. A thousand shrieking
rockets, perhaps, with at the end an explosion and a rain of fragments
like rocks from Vesuvius. They had a peculiar faculty for getting on the
nerves. The men watched their coming with something like shrinking, with