reams of wagons, guns, horses and men were passing with the
appearance of a retreat and yet with the steady regularity of an
ordinary march, formed the camping-ground of Genl. Fitz-John Porter's
command, lately the right wing but now the rear of the army of the
Potomac. The shattered remnants of the corps of that indomitable
General, who after services of the first bravery and importance, was so
soon afterwards to be placed in an ambiguous position before the country
and dismissed from a service which he had illustrated rather than
disgraced,--together with portions of those of Sumner, Heintzelman and
Keyes, made up his present command and the rear-guard of the army,
holding this point on the Richmond and Charles City road. And whatever
may have been the merits of other commands embraced in that still vast
army, in that of General Porter was certainly included Borne of the best
regulars yet spared to the service, and some of the bravest and most
efficient volunteer regiments that were ever suddenly formed from the
ranks of civil life, to defend the honor of any country. To them the
often-misapplied phrase, "war-worn veterans," could now be applied
without mockery, for the men and their encampment furniture looked alike
worn and jaded, and it was only by their regularity and evident
discipline that they could be recognized for what they really were--the
most reliable soldiers in the army, and men well worthy of the trust
confided to them, of defending the threatened rear and breaking any
sudden assault of a foe flushed with success. Those men who stood upon
guard at various points of the hasty encampment, may have been faded and
ragged in uniform, the arms they bore may have shown hard usage, and
their discolored tents showed little of the "pomp and circumstance of
glorious war;" but they had full warrant for all this in past services,
for not a storm in all the long campaign that they had not breasted, and
not a battle of all the long line on the Peninsula in which they had not
sown the soil of freedom with sacred seed from their thinned ranks.

A bloodless military pageant may be a splendid spectacle, and hearts may
beat high and eyes grow bright when the steady foot-fall of our
"household troops" is heard on Broadway, and they file by with rich
music, flashing banners and the proud consciousness of a strength that
would be terrible if asserted; but what are such feelings to those with
which the truly patriotic look upo