ver in the face of the formidable force which was
guarding the ford two or three miles in our front. In fact, for some
days we had been preparing for the effort, and up in a sluggish bayou
the best of our mechanics were industriously at work fashioning a rude
scow out of such material as axes could get from the native forests. In
this craft, if it could be made to float, a select party was to cross
the river some foggy morning, while the enemy were intently watching the
ford below, and then, while the chosen few were being gloriously shot on
the other side, the rest of us were to attempt the waist-deep, crooked
ford.

For the time we were, however, as has been said, enjoying the cream of
army life. The nights were chilly, though the days were hot and the clay
roads dusty. The mornings were glorious with their bracing fresh air,
their blue mists clinging about far-off Lookout Mountain, and even
hiding the top of Waldron's Ridge at our backs, and their bright
sunshine, which came flooding over the distant heights of Georgia and
North Carolina. The wagon-tracks winding among the low, mound-like hills
which filled the valley from the base of the ridge to the river were as
smooth and gravelly as a well-kept private roadway, and an
ambulance-ride along their tortuous courses was a most enjoyable
recreation in those fine September days of 1863. A gallop twenty miles
up the valley to where Minty kept watch and ward upon our flank with his
trusty horsemen; a dinner at that hospitable mess-table, furnished maybe
with a pig which had strayed from its home not wholly through natural
perversity; and then a lively ride back in the early evening,--this,
indeed, was pleasure.

The charm of campaigning is its rapidly-succeeding surprises. The
general of the army may be proceeding regularly in the path he marked
out months before. The corps commanders, and even the chiefs of
division, may sometimes be able to foresee the movements from day to
day. But to their subordinates everything is a surprise: they lie down
at night in delightful uncertainty as to where the next sunset will find
them, and they sit down to a breakfast of hard bread and bacon, relieved
by a little foraging from the country, not sure that their coffee will
cool before the bugle sounds a signal to pack and be off, to Heaven
knows where. We found this charm of surprise, as we had hundreds of
times before in other places, at our camp in the valley of the
Tennessee. The