presentation, and the return of the
Colonels followed in rapid succession amid the rejoicings of officers
and men.

--Amid the waste of meadow and woodland that characterized the face of
that country, the houses of the farmers, or rather, to use the
grandiloquent language of the inhabitants, "the mansions of the
planters," were objects of peculiar interest. In their quaint appearance
and general air of dilapidation, they stood as relics of the
civilization of another age. Centuries, seemingly, of important events
in the law of progress are crowded into years of our campaigning. The
social status of a large country semi-civilized--whether you regard the
intelligence of its people or the condition of its society--is being
suddenly altered. The war accomplishes what well-designing men lacked
nerve and ability to execute--emancipation. The blessings of a purer
civilization will follow as naturally as sunshine follows storm.

And yet here and there these old buildings would be varied by one
evidently framed upon a Yankee model. Such was what was widely known in
the army as "the Moncure House." On a commanding site at the edge of a
meadow several miles in length, and that seemed from the abrupt bluffs
that bordered it to have been once the bottom of a lake, this two-story
weather-board frame was readily discernible. Its location made it a
prominent point, too, upon the picket line, and it was favored above its
fellows by daily and nightly occupancy by officers of the command. At
this period the Regiment almost lived upon the picket line. An old
wench, with several chalky complexioned children, whose paternal
ancestor was understood to be under a musket of English manufacture
perhaps, somewhere on the south side of the Rappahannock, occupied the
kitchen of the premises. She was unceasing in reminding her military
co-lodgers that the room used by them as head-quarters,--from the window
of which you could take in at a glance the fine expanse of valley,
threaded by a sparkling tributary of the Potomac,--was massa's study,
and that massa was a preacher and had written a "right smart" lot of
sermons in that very place. In the eyes of Dinah the room was invested
with a peculiar sanctity. Not so with its present occupants, who could
not learn that the minister, who was a large slaveholder, had remembered
"those in bonds as bound with them," and who were quite content that
artillery proclaiming "liberty throughout the land" in tones