as since told me
that he asked permission to throw the militia (including ourselves)
across one of Lee's lines of retreat. If he had been permitted to do
so, I suppose you and I would not have been in correspondence now.

"You remember undoubtedly the flag of truce that came up into the town
before the bombardment began. The man was on horseback and had the
conventional white flag. The story was that Baldy Smith sent word
'that if they wanted the town they could come and take it.' {267} I
suppose you realise that we were really a part of Meade's right, and
that we helped somewhat to delay the rebel left wing. Do you not
remember hearing from our position at Carlisle the guns of that great
battle--the turning-point of the war? {268}

"I could run on in this way, but your own memory must be full of the
subject. I wish that we could sometime have a reunion of the old
battery in Philadelphia. I have a most distinct and pleasant
remembrance of your brother--a charming personality indeed, a handsome
refined face and dignified bearing. I remember being so starved as to
eat crackers that had fallen on the ground; and I devoured, too, wheat
from the fields rubbed in the hands to free it from the ear. . . .

"Sincerely,
R. W. GILDER.

"_P.S._--I could write more, but you will not need it from me."

Truly, I was that other comrade whom Gilder overheard commending him, and
it was I who gave him something to eat, I being the one in camp who
looked specially after two or three of the youngest to see that they did
not starve, and who doctored the invalids.

I here note, with all due diffidence, that Mr. Gilder chiefly remembers
me as "a splendid expressor of our miseries, with a magnificent
vocabulary" wherewith to set forth fearful adversities. I have never
been habitually loquacious in life; full many deem me deeply reticent and
owl-like in my taciturnity, but I "can hoot when the moon shines," nor is
there altogether lacking in me in great emergencies a certain rude kind
of popular eloquence, which has--I avow it with humility--enabled me
invariably to hold my own in verbal encounters with tinkers, gypsies, and
the like, among whom "chaff" is developed to a degree of which few
respectable people have any conception, and which attains to a refinement
of sarcasm, _originality_, and humour in the London of the lower orders,
for which there is no parallel in