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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Whip and Spur, by George E. Waring
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Whip and Spur
+
+Author: George E. Waring
+
+Release Date: December 24, 2013 [EBook #44492]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WHIP AND SPUR ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by The Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
+http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images
+generously made available by The Internet Archive)
+
+
+
+
+
+    WHIP AND SPUR
+
+    BY
+
+    COL. GEORGE E. WARING, JR.
+
+
+    NEW YORK
+    DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
+    MCMIV
+
+
+    COPYRIGHT, 1897
+    BY DOUBLEDAY & McCLURE CO.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS.
+
+
+                                      PAGE
+
+    VIX                                  7
+
+    RUBY                                34
+
+    WETTSTEIN                           67
+
+    CAMPAIGNING WITH MAX                93
+
+    HOW I GOT MY OVERCOAT              138
+
+    TWO SCOUTS                         162
+
+    IN THE GLOAMING                    186
+
+    FOX-HUNTING IN ENGLAND             201
+
+
+
+
+WHIP AND SPUR.
+
+VIX.
+
+
+When the work on the Central Park had fairly commenced, in the spring
+of 1858, I found--or I fancied--that proper attention to my scattered
+duties made it necessary that I should have a saddle-horse.
+
+How easily, by the way, the arguments that convince us of these
+pleasant necessities find their way to the understanding!
+
+Yet, how to subsist a horse after buying one, and how to buy? The
+memory of a well-bred and keen-eyed gray, dating back to the earliest
+days of my boyhood, and forming the chief feature of my recollection
+of play-time for years; an idle propensity, not a whit dulled yet, to
+linger over Leech's long-necked hunters, and Herring's field scenes;
+an almost superstitious faith in the different analyses of the bones
+of the racer and of the cart-horse; a firm belief in Frank Forester's
+teachings of the value of "blood,"--all these conspired to narrow
+my range of selection, and, unfortunately, to confine it to a very
+expensive class of horses.
+
+Unfortunately, again, the commissioners of the Park had extremely
+inconvenient ideas of economy, and evidently did not consider, in
+fixing their schedule of salaries, how much more satisfactory our
+positions would have been with more generous emolument.
+
+How a man with only a Park salary, and with a family to support, could
+set up a saddle-horse,--and not ride to the dogs,--was a question that
+exercised not a little of my engineering talent for weeks; and many an
+odd corner of plans and estimates was figured over with calculations of
+the cost of forage and shoeing.
+
+Stable-room was plenty and free in the condemned buildings of the
+former occupants, and a little "over-time" of one of the men would
+suffice for the grooming.
+
+I finally concluded that, by giving up cigars, and devoting my energies
+to the pipe in their stead, I could save enough to pay for my horse's
+keep; and so, the ways and means having been, in this somewhat vague
+manner, provided, the next step was to buy a horse. To tell of the days
+passed at auction sales in the hope (never there realized) of finding
+goodness and cheapness combined,--of the stationery wasted in answering
+advertisements based on every conceivable form of false pretence; to
+describe the numberless broken-kneed, broken-winded, and broken-down
+brutes that came under inspection,--would be tedious and disheartening.
+
+Good horses there were, of course, though very few good saddle-horses
+(America is not productive in this direction),--and the possible
+animals were held at impossible prices.
+
+Those who rode over the new Park lands usually rode anything
+but good saddle-horses. Fast trotters, stout ponies, tolerable
+carriage-horses, capital cart-horses, there were in plenty. But
+the clean-cut, thin-crested, bright-eyed, fine-eared, steel-limbed
+saddle-horse, the saddle-horse _par excellence_,--may I say the only
+saddle-horse?--rarely came under observation; and when, by exception,
+such a one did appear, he was usually so ridden that his light was
+sadly dimmed. It was hard to recognize an elastic step under such an
+unelastic seat.
+
+Finally, in the days of my despair, a kind saddler,--kept to his daily
+awl by a too keen eye for sport, and still, I believe, a victim to
+his propensity for laying his money on the horse that ought to win
+but don't,--hearing of my ambition (to him the most laudable of all
+ambitions), came to put me on the long-sought path.
+
+He knew a mare, or he had known one, that would exactly suit me. She
+was in a bad way now, and a good deal run down, but he always thought
+she "had it in her," and that some gentleman ought to keep her for the
+saddle,--"which, in my mind, sir, she be the finest bit of 'orse-flesh
+that was hever imported, sir." That was enough. "Imported" decided my
+case, and I listened eagerly to the enthusiastic story,--a story to
+which this man's life was bound with threads of hard-earned silver, and
+not less by a real honest love for a fine animal. He had never been
+much given to saving, but he was a good workman, and the little he had
+saved had been blown away in the dust that clouded his favorite at the
+tail of the race.
+
+Still, he attached himself to her person, and followed her in her
+disgrace. "She weren't quite quick enough for the turf, sir, but she be
+a good 'un for a gentleman's 'ack."
+
+He had watched her for years, and scraped acquaintance with her
+different owners as fast as she had changed them, and finally, when she
+was far gone with pneumonia, he had accepted her as a gift, and, by
+careful nursing, had cured her. Then, for a time, he rode her himself,
+and his eye brightened as he told of her leaps and her stride. Of
+course he rode her to the races, and--one luckless day--when he had
+lost everything, and his passion had got the better of his prudence, he
+staked the mare herself on a perfectly sure thing in two-mile-heats.
+Like most of the sure things of life, this venture went to the bad,
+and the mare was lost,--lost to a Bull's Head dealer in single driving
+horses. "I see her in his stable ahfter that, sir; and, forbieten
+she were twelve year old, sir, and 'ad 'ad a 'ard life of it, she
+were the youngest and likeliest of the lot,--you'd swore she were a
+three-year-old, sir."
+
+If that dealer had had a soul above trotting-wagons, my story would
+never have been written; but all was fish that came to his net, and
+this thoroughbred racer, this beautiful creature who had never worn
+harness in her life, must be shown to a purchaser who was seeking
+something to drive. She was always quick to decide, and her actions
+followed close on the heels of her thought. She did not complicate
+matters by waiting for the gentleman to get into the wagon, but then
+and there--on the instant--kicked it to kindlings. This ended the
+story. She had been shown at a high figure, and was subsequently sold
+for a song,--he could tell me no more. She had passed to the lower
+sphere of equine life and usefulness,--he _had_ heard of a fish-wagon,
+but he knew nothing about it. What he did know was, that the dealer was
+a dreadful jockey, and that it would never do to ask him. Now, here was
+something to live for,--a sort of princess in disgrace, whom it would
+be an honor to rescue, and my horse-hunting acquired a new interest.
+
+By easy stages, I cultivated the friendship of the youth who, in
+those days, did the morning's sweeping-out at the Bull's Head Hotel.
+He had grown up in the alluring shades of the horse-market, and his
+daily communion from childhood had been with that "noble animal." To
+him horses were the individuals of the world,--men their necessary
+attendants, and of only attendant importance. Of course he knew of this
+black she-devil; and he thought that "a hoss that could trot like she
+could on the halter" must be crazy not to go in harness.
+
+However, he thought she had got her deserts now, for he had seen her,
+only a few weeks before, "a draggin' clams for a feller in the Tenth
+Avener." Here was a clew at last,--clams and the Tenth Avenue. For
+several days the scent grew cold. The people of the Licensed Vender
+part of this street seemed to have little interest in their neighbors'
+horses; but I found one man, an Irish grocer, who had been bred a
+stable-boy to the Marquis of Waterford, and who did know of a "poor old
+screw of a black mare" that had a good head, and might be the one I was
+looking for; but, if she was, he thought I might as well give it up,
+for she was all broken down, and would never be good for anything again.
+
+Taking the address, I went to a stable-yard, in what was then the very
+edge of the town, and here I found a knowing young man, who devoted his
+time to peddling clams and potatoes between New York and Sing Sing.
+Clams up, and potatoes down,--twice every week,--distance thirty miles;
+road hilly; and that was the wagon he did it with,--a heavy wagon with
+a heavy arched top, and room for a heavy load, and only shafts for a
+single horse. In reply to my question, he said he changed horses pretty
+often, because the work broke them down; but he had a mare now that
+had been at it for three months, and he thought she would last some
+time longer. "She's pretty thin, but you ought to see her trot with
+that wagon." With an air of idle curiosity, I asked to see her,--I had
+gone shabbily dressed, not to excite suspicion; for men of the class I
+had to treat with are usually sharp horse-traders,--and this fellow,
+clam-pedler though he was, showed an enthusiastic alacrity in taking
+me to her stall. She had won even his dull heart, and he spoke of her
+gently, as he made the most of her good points, and glossed over her
+wretched condition.
+
+Poor Vixen (that had been her name in her better days, and it was to
+be her name again), she had found it hard kicking against the pricks!
+Clam-carts are stronger than trotting-wagons, and even her efforts had
+been vain. She had succumbed to dire necessity, and earned her ignoble
+oats with dogged fidelity. She had a little warm corner in her driver's
+affections,--as she always had in the affections of all who came to
+know her well,--but her lot was a very hard one. Worn to a skeleton,
+with sore galls wherever the harness had pressed her, her pasterns
+bruised by clumsy shoes, her silky coat burned brown by the sun, and
+her neck curved upward, it would have needed more than my knowledge of
+anatomy to see anything good in her but for her wonderful head. This
+was the perfection of a horse's head,--small, bony, and of perfect
+shape, with keen, deer-like eyes, and thin, active ears; it told the
+whole story of her virtues, and showed no trace of her sufferings. Her
+royal blood shone out from her face, and kept it beautiful.
+
+My mind was made up, and Vixen must be mine at any cost. Still, it
+was important to me to buy as cheaply as I could,--and desirable,
+above all, not to be jockeyed in a horse-trade; so it required some
+diplomacy (an account of which would not be edifying here) to bring the
+transaction to its successful close. The pendulum which swung between
+offer and demand finally rested at seventy-five dollars.
+
+She was brought to me at the Park on a bright moonlight evening in
+June, and we were called out to see her. I think she knew that her
+harness days were over, and she danced off to her new quarters as gay
+as a colt in training. That night my wakefulness would have done credit
+to a boy of sixteen; and I was up with the dawn, and bound for a ride;
+but when I examined poor Vix again in her stable, it seemed almost
+cruel to think of using her at all for a month. She was so thin, so
+worn, so bruised, that I determined to give her a long rest and good
+care,--only I must try her once, just to get a leg over her for five
+minutes, and then she should come back and be cared for until really
+well. It was a weak thing to do, and I confess it with all needful
+humiliation, but I mounted her at once; and, although I had been a
+rider all my days, this was the first time I had ever really ridden.
+For the first time in my life I felt as though I had four whalebone
+legs of my own, worked by steel muscles in accordance with my will, but
+without even a conscious effort of will.
+
+That that anatomy of a horse should so easily, so playfully, handle
+my heavy weight was a mystery, and is a mystery still. She carried me
+in the same high, long-reaching, elastic trot that we sometimes see a
+young horse strike when first turned into a field. A low fence was near
+by, and I turned her toward it. She cleared it with a bound that sent
+all my blood thrilling through my veins, and trotted on again as though
+nothing had occurred. The five minutes' turn was taken with so much
+ease, with such evident delight, that I made it a virtue to indulge her
+with a longer course and a longer stride. We went to the far corners of
+the Park, and tried all our paces; all were marvellous for the power so
+easily exerted and the evident power in reserve.
+
+Yes, Frank Forester was right, blood horses are made of finer stuff
+than others. My intention of giving the poor old mare a month's rest
+was never carried out, because each return to her old recreation--it
+was never work--made it more evident that the simple change in her
+life was all she needed; and, although in constant use from the first,
+she soon put on the flesh and form of a sound horse. Her minor bruises
+were obliterated, and her more grievous ones grew into permanent
+scars,--blemishes, but only skin deep; for every fibre of every muscle,
+and every tendon and bone in her whole body, was as strong and supple
+as spring steel.
+
+The Park afforded good leaping in those days. Some of the fences
+were still standing around the abandoned gardens, and new ditches
+and old brooks were plenty. Vixen gave me lessons in fencing which a
+few years later, in time of graver need, stood me in good stead. She
+weighed less than four times the weight that she carried; yet she
+cleared a four-foot fence with apparent ease, and once, in a moment
+of excitement, she carried me over a brook, with a clear leap of
+twenty-six feet, measured from the taking-off to the landing.
+
+Her feats of endurance were equal to her feats of strength. I once
+rode her from Yorkville to Rye (twenty-one miles) in an hour and
+forty-five minutes, including a rest of twenty minutes at Pelham
+Bridge, and I frequently rode twenty-five miles out in the morning and
+back in the afternoon. When put to her work, her steady road gallop
+(mostly on the grassy sides) was fifteen miles an hour.
+
+Of course these were extreme cases; but she never showed fatigue
+from them, and she did good service nearly every day, winter and
+summer, from her twelfth to her fifteenth year, keeping always in good
+condition, though thin as a racer, and looking like a colt at the end
+of the time. Horsemen never guessed her age at more than half of what
+it actually was.
+
+Beyond the average of even the most intelligent horses, she showed
+some almost human traits. Above all was she fond of children, and would
+quiet down from her wildest moods to allow a child to be carried on the
+pommel. When engaged in this serious duty, it was difficult to excite
+her, or to urge her out of a slow and measured pace, although usually
+ready for any extravagance. Not the least marked of her peculiarities
+was her inordinate vanity. On a country road, or among the workmen of
+the Park, she was as staid and business-like as a parson's cob; but
+let a carriage or a party of visitors come in sight, and she would
+give herself the prancing airs of a circus horse, seeming to watch
+as eagerly for some sign of approval, and to be made as happy by it,
+as though she only lived to be admired. Many a time have I heard the
+exclamation, "What a beautiful horse!" and Vix seemed to hear it too,
+and to appreciate it quite as keenly as I did. A trip down the Fifth
+Avenue in the afternoon was an immense excitement to her, and she was
+more fatigued by it than by a twenty-mile gallop. However slowly she
+travelled, it was always with the high springing action of a fast trot,
+or with that long-stepping, sidelong action that the French call _a
+deux pistes_; few people allowed her to pass without admiring notice.
+
+Her most satisfactory trait was her fondness for her master; she
+was as good company as a dog,--better, perhaps, because she seemed
+more really a part of one's self; and she was quick to respond to my
+changing moods. I have sometimes, when unable to sleep, got up in the
+night and saddled for a ride, usually ending in a long walk home, with
+the bridle over my arm, and the old mare's kind face close beside my
+own, in something akin to human sympathy; she had a way of sighing,
+when things were especially sad, that made her very comforting to have
+about. So we went on for three years, always together, and always very
+much to each other. We had our little unhappy episodes, when she was
+pettish and I was harsh,--sometimes her feminine freaks were the cause,
+sometimes my masculine blundering,--but we always made it up, and were
+soon good friends again, and, on the whole, we were both better for
+the friendship. I am sure that I was, and some of my more grateful
+recollections are connected with this dumb companion.
+
+The spring of 1861 opened a new life for both of us,--a sad and a short
+one for poor Vix.
+
+I never knew just how much influence she had in getting my commission,
+but, judging by the manner of the other field officers of the regiment,
+she was evidently regarded as the better half of the new acquisition.
+The pomp and circumstance of glorious war suited her temper exactly,
+and it was ludicrous to see her satisfaction in first wearing her
+gorgeous red-bordered shabrack; for a time she carried her head on one
+side to see it. She conceived a new affection for me from the moment
+when she saw me bedecked with the dazzling bloom that preceded the
+serious fruitage of the early New York volunteer organizations.
+
+At last the thrilling day came. Broadway was alive from end to end
+with flags and white cambric and sad faces. Another thousand were
+going to the war. With Swiss bugle-march and chanted Marseillaise, we
+made our solemn way through the grave and anxious throng. To us it was
+naturally a day of sore trial; but with brilliant, happy Vixen it was
+far different; she was leaving no friends behind, was going to meet no
+unknown peril. She was showing her royal, stylish beauty to an admiring
+crowd, and she acted as though she took to her own especial behoof
+every cheer that rang from Union Square to Cortlandt Street. It was the
+glorious day of her life, and, as we dismounted at the Jersey ferry,
+she was trembling still with the delightful excitement.
+
+At Washington we were encamped east of the Capitol, and for a month
+were busy in getting settled in the new harness. Mr. Lincoln used to
+drive out sometimes to our evening drill, and he always had a pleasant
+word--as he always had for every one, and as every one had for her--for
+my charming thoroughbred, who had made herself perfectly at home with
+the troops, and enjoyed every display of the marvellous raiment of the
+regiment.
+
+On the 4th of July we crossed the Potomac and went below Alexandria,
+where we lay in idle preparation for the coming disaster. On the 16th
+we marched, in Blenker's brigade of Miles's division, and we passed the
+night in a hay-field, with a confusion of horses' feed and riders' bed,
+that brought Vix and me very closely together. On the 18th we reached
+the valley this side of Centreville, while the skirmish of Blackburn's
+Ford was going on,--a skirmish now, but a battle then. For three nights
+and two days we lay in the bushes, waiting for rations and orders.
+On Sunday morning McDowell's army moved out;--we all know the rest.
+Miles's thirteen thousand fresh troops lay within sight and sound of
+the lost battle-field,--he drunk and unable, even if not unwilling, to
+take them to the rescue,--and all we did was, late in the evening, to
+turn back a few troopers of the Black Horse Cavalry, the moral effect
+of whose unseen terrors was driving our herds, panting, back to the
+Potomac. Late in the night we turned our backs on our idle field, and
+brought up the rear of the sad retreat. Our regiment was the last to
+move out, and Vix and I were with the rear-guard. Wet, cold, tired,
+hungry, unpursued, we crept slowly through the scattered _debris_ of
+the broken-up camp equipage, and dismally crossed the Long Bridge in a
+pitiless rain, as Monday's evening was closing in. O, the dreadful days
+that followed, when a dozen resolute men might have taken Washington,
+and have driven the army across the Chesapeake, when everything was
+filled with gloom and rain and grave uncertainty!
+
+Again the old mare came to my aid. My regiment was not a pleasant one
+to be with, for its excellent material did not redeem its very bad
+commander, and I longed for service with the cavalry. Fremont was going
+to St. Louis, and his chief of staff was looking for cavalry officers.
+He had long known Vixen, and was kind enough to tell me that he wanted
+_her_ for the new organization, and (as I was her necessary appendage),
+he procured my transfer, and we set out for the West. It was not
+especially flattering to me to be taken on these grounds; but it was
+flattering to Vixen, and that was quite as pleasant.
+
+Arrived at St. Louis, we set about the organization of the
+enthusiastic thousands who rushed to serve under Fremont. Whatever
+there was of ostentatious display, Vixen and I took part in, but this
+was not much. Once we turned out in great state to receive Prince
+Plon-Plon, but that was in the night, and he didn't come after all.
+Once again there was a review of all the troops, and that _was_
+magnificent. This was all. There was no coach and four, nor anything
+else but downright hard work from early morning till late bedtime, from
+Sunday morning till Saturday night. For six weeks, while my regiment of
+German horsemen was fitting up and drilling at the Abbey Race-track,
+I rode a cart-horse, and kept the mare in training for the hard work
+ahead.
+
+At last we were off, going up the Missouri, sticking in its mud,
+poling over its shoals, and being bored generally. At Jefferson
+City Vixen made her last appearance in ladies' society, as by the
+twilight fires of the General's camp she went through her graceful
+paces before Mrs. Fremont and her daughter. I pass over the eventful
+pursuit of Price's army, because the subject of my story played only
+a passive part in it. At Springfield I tried her nerve by jumping her
+over the dead horses on brave Zagonyi's bloody field; and, although
+distastefully, she did my bidding without flinching, when she found it
+must be done. The camp-life at Springfield was full of excitement and
+earnestness; Price, with his army, was near at hand (or we believed
+that he was, which was essentially the same). Our work in the cavalry
+was very active, and Vix had hard service on insufficient food,--she
+seemed to be sustained by sheer nervous strength.
+
+At last the order to advance was given, and we were to move out at
+daybreak; then came a countermanding order; and then, late in the
+evening, Fremont's farewell. He had been relieved. There was genuine
+and universal grief. Good or bad, competent or incompetent,--this is
+not the place to argue that,--he was the life and the soul of his
+army, and it was cruelly wronged in his removal. Spiritless and full
+of disappointment, we again turned back from our aim;--then would have
+been Price's opportunity.
+
+It was the loveliest Indian-summer weather, and the wonderful opal
+atmosphere of the Ozark Mountains was redolent with the freshness of a
+second spring. As had always been my habit in dreamy or unhappy moods,
+I rode my poor tired mare for companionship's sake,--I ought not to
+have done it,--I would give much not to have done it, for I never rode
+her again. The march was long, and the noonday sun was oppressive. She
+who had never faltered before grew nervous and shaky now, and once,
+after fording the Pomme-de-Terre in deep water, she behaved wildly; but
+when I talked to her, called her a good girl, and combed her silken
+mane with my fingers, she came back to her old way, and went on nicely.
+Still she perspired unnaturally, and I felt uneasy about her when I
+dismounted and gave her rein to Rudolf, my orderly.
+
+Late in the night, when the moon was in mid-heaven, he came to my
+tent, and told me that something was the matter with Vixen. My adjutant
+and I hastened out, and there we beheld her in the agony of a brain
+fever. She was the most painfully magnificent animal I ever saw.
+Crouched on the ground, with her forelegs stretched out and wide apart,
+she was swaying to and fro, with hard and stertorous breath,--every
+vein swollen and throbbing in the moonlight. De Grandele, our quiet
+veterinary surgeon, had been called while it was yet time to apply the
+lancet. As the hot stream spurted from her neck she grew easier; her
+eye recovered its gentleness, and she laid her head against my breast
+with the old sigh, and seemed to know and to return all my love for
+her. I sat with her until the first gray of dawn, when she had grown
+quite calm, and then I left her with De Grandele and Rudolf while
+I went to my duties. We must march at five o'clock, and poor Vixen
+could not be moved. The thought of leaving her was very bitter, but
+I feared it must be done, and I asked De Grandele how he could best
+end her sufferings,--or was there still some hope? He shook his head
+mournfully, like a kind-hearted doctor as he was, and said that he
+feared not; but still, as I was so fond of her, if I would leave him
+six men, he would do his best to bring her on, and, if he could not, he
+would not leave her alive. I have had few harder duties than to march
+that morning. Four days after, De Grandele sent a message to me at our
+station near Rolla, that he was coming on nicely, and hoped to be in
+at nightfall. "Vixen seems to be better and stronger." At nightfall
+they came, the poor old creature stepping slowly and timidly over the
+rough road, all the old fire and force gone out of her, and with only a
+feeble whinny as she saw me walking to meet her. We built for her the
+best quarters we could under the mountain-side, and spread her a soft
+bed of leaves. There was now hope that she would recover sufficiently
+to be sent to St. Louis to be nursed.
+
+That night, an infernal brute of a troop horse that had already killed
+Ludlow's charger, led by some fiendish spirit, broke into Vixen's
+enclosure, and with one kick laid open her hock joint.
+
+In vain they told me that she was incurable. I could not let her die
+now, when she was just restored to me; and I forced from De Grandele
+the confession that she _might_ be slung up and so bound that the wound
+would heal, although the joint must be stiff. She could never carry me
+again, but she could be my pet; and I would send her home, and make her
+happy for many a long year yet. We moved camp two miles, to the edge
+of the town, and she followed, painfully and slowly, the injured limb
+dragging behind her; I could not give her up. She was picketed near my
+tent, and for some days grew no worse.
+
+Finally, one lovely Sunday morning, I found her sitting on her haunches
+like a dog, patient and gentle, and wondering at her pain. She remained
+in this position all day, refusing food. I stroked her velvet crest,
+and coaxed her with sugar. She rubbed her nose against my arm, and was
+evidently thankful for my caresses, but she showed no disposition to
+rise. The adjutant led me into my tent as he would have led me from the
+bedside of a dying friend. I turned to look back at poor Vixen, and she
+gave me a little neigh of farewell.
+
+They told me then, and they told it very tenderly, that there was no
+possibility that she could get well in camp, and that they wanted me
+to give her over to them. The adjutant sat by me, and talked of the
+old days when I had had her at home, and when he had known her well.
+We brought back all of her pleasant ways, and agreed that her trouble
+ought to be ended.
+
+As we talked, a single shot was fired, and all was over. The setting
+sun was shining through the bare November branches, and lay warm in
+my open tent-front. The band, which had been brought out for the only
+funeral ceremony, breathed softly Kreutzer's touching "Die Kapelle,"
+and the sun went down on one of the very sad days of my life.
+
+The next morning I carved deeply in the bark of a great oak-tree, at
+the side of the Pacific Railroad, beneath which they had buried my
+lovely mare, a simple VIX; and some day I shall go to scrape the moss
+from the inscription.
+
+
+
+
+RUBY.
+
+
+I was a colonel commanding a regiment of German cavalrymen in South
+Missouri, and must have a horse; it was desirable to be conspicuously
+well mounted, and so it must be a showy horse; being a heavy weight and
+a rough rider, it must be a good horse. With less rank, I might have
+been compelled to take a very ordinary mount and be content: my vanity
+would not have availed me, and my rough riding must have ceased.
+
+But I was chief ruler of the little world that lay encamped on the
+beautiful banks of the Roubie d'Eaux; and probably life was easier to
+all under me when I was satisfied and happy. I am not conscious of
+having been mean and crabbed, or of favoring those who favored me to
+the disadvantage of those who did not. I cannot recall an instance of
+taking a bribe, even in the form of a pleasant smile. It was probably
+easier, in the long run, to be fair than to be unfair, and therefore
+the laziest private ever ordered on extra duty could not lay his hand
+on his heart and say he thinks it was done because he was not diligent
+in foraging for turkeys and hens for my private mess. I had very early
+in life been impressed with the consciousness that the way of the
+transgressor is not easy; and as I wanted my way to be easy, I fell
+into the way of not transgressing.
+
+This may not have been a very worthy motive to actuate the conduct of
+a military commander; but perhaps it was as good as the average in our
+Department of the Southwest, where, if the truth must be told, virtue
+did not have it all its own way,--we were different from troops farther
+east; and although it made me sometimes wince to have my conduct
+ascribed to a noble uprightness of purpose, and showed that it would
+really have been more honest not to have been quite so good, yet one
+should perhaps be satisfied with having carried out one's intention of
+treating every man in the command, officer or soldier, as nearly as he
+should be treated as the interests of the public service, the good of
+the individual himself, and one's own personal convenience would allow.
+
+Therefore, I say, I am not conscious of having favored those who
+favored me, to the disadvantage of those who did not; neither do I
+think that (at this stage of our acquaintance) the Grafs and Barons
+and simple Mister Vons, of whom the command was so largely composed,
+entertained the hope of personal benefit when they laid their
+kindnesses at my accustomed feet, and tried to smooth my way of life.
+
+The headquarters' mess was generally well supplied,--and no questions
+asked. My relations with most of the command were kindly, and it
+apparently came to be understood--for German cavalrymen are not without
+intelligence--that the happiness of the individual members of the
+regiment depended rather on the happiness of its colonel than on any
+direct bids for his favor. Be this as it may, I am not conscious of
+having received such direct appeals, and I am entirely conscious of the
+fullest measure of happiness that my circumstances would allow; not an
+ecstasy of delight,--far from that,--but a comfortable sense of such
+well-fed, well-paid, well-encamped, and pleasantly occupied virtue as
+had left nothing undone that my subordinates could be made to do, and
+did nothing that my conditions rendered difficult. My own good-humor
+was equalled by that of the regiment at large, and the beetling sides
+of the Ozark valleys nowhere sheltered a happier campful of jolly good
+fellows than the Vierte Missouri Cavalry.
+
+We lay on the marvellous Roubie d'Eaux, at its source; no such
+babbling brook as trickles from the hillside springs of New England,
+but a roaring torrent, breaking at once from a fathomless vent in the
+mountain. The processes of formation with these South Missouri rivers
+are all hidden from sight, but, far away in the topmost caves of the
+Ozark hills, the little streamlets trickle, and unite for a larger and
+ever larger flow, gorging at last the huge caverns of the limestone
+rock and bursting upon the world a full-grown river. Within our camp
+this wonderful spring broke forth, and close at hand was a large
+grist-mill that it drove. We were a self-sustaining community,--in
+this, that we foraged our own corn and ground our own meal. With
+similar industry we provided ourselves with fish, flesh, and fowl.
+
+The trees were bare with the November frosts, but the Indian summer had
+come, and, day after day, it bathed every twig and spray with its amber
+breath, warming all nature to a second life, and floating the remoter
+hills far away into a hazy dreamland.
+
+But personally, notwithstanding all this, I was not content: I was
+practically a dismounted cavalryman. Indeed, it would even have been
+a pity to see a colonel of infantry riding such brutes as fell to my
+lot, for good weight-carriers were rare in that section. I had paid a
+very high price for a young thoroughbred stallion (afterwards, happily,
+sold for a large advance), only to find him a year too young for his
+work, and the regiment had been scoured in vain for an available mount.
+I would have gone any reasonable length, even in injustice, to secure
+such an animal as was needed. It was not easy to make up one's mind to
+order a soldier to give up a horse he was fond of, and some soldier had
+an especial fondness for all but the worthless brutes. My reluctance to
+do this was perhaps not lessened by the fact that it was forbidden for
+officers to ride United States horses. It finally became evident that
+the chances were very small of ever finding a suitable animal, and I
+even went out, on one shooting excursion, mounted on a mule.
+
+Up to this time the regiment had been all that could be asked, but
+now it seemed to contain a thousand ill-tempered, sore-headed men.
+The whole camp was awry. Some of the officers intimated that this was
+all the fault of the adjutant; that the orders from headquarters had
+lately been unusually harsh. This officer, when remonstrated with,
+insisted that he had only transmitted the exact orders given him, and I
+knew that my own action had always been reasonable,--on principle so.
+Sometimes one almost wished himself back in civil life, away from such
+constant annoyances.
+
+We had in the regiment one Captain Graf von Gluckmansklegge, who was
+in many respects the most accomplished and skilful officer of us all.
+His life had been passed in the profession, and he had only left his
+position of major in a Bavarian Uhlan regiment to draw his sabre in
+defence of "die Freiheit," in America, as senior captain of the Fourth
+Missouri Cavalry. He was an officer of Asboth's selection, and had
+many of that veteran's qualities. Tall, thin, of elegant figure, as
+perfect a horseman as good natural advantages and good training could
+make, and near-sighted, as a German cavalry officer must be, he was
+as natty a fellow as ever wore an eye-glass and a blond mustache. He
+was, at the same time, a man of keen worldly shrewdness and of quick
+judgment,--qualities which, in his case, may have been sharpened by
+long practice at those games of chance with which it has not been
+unusual for European officers to preface their coming to draw their
+sabres in defence of "die Freiheit" in America.
+
+With Gluckmansklegge I had always been on friendly terms. Among the
+many lessons of his life he had learned none more thoroughly than
+the best way to treat his commanding officer; and there was in his
+manner an air of friendly deference and of cordial submission to rank,
+accompanied by a degree of personal dignity, that elevated the colonel
+rather than lowered the captain,--a manner that probably makes its way
+with a newly fledged officer more surely than any other form of appeal
+to his vanity. One sometimes saw a brand-new second-lieutenant made
+happier than a king by this same touch of skill from an old soldier
+in his company, whom he knew to be far his superior in all matters of
+service. To be quite frank, if I have an element of snobbishness in my
+own organization, it has been more nurtured into life by the military
+deference of better soldiers than myself under my command than by all
+other influences combined; thus modified do the best of us become in
+the presence of unmerited praise.
+
+One evening Gluckmansklegge came to my tent door: "Escoose, Col-o-nel,
+may I come?" And then, flinging out his eye-glass with a toss of the
+head, he went on, with his imperfect English, to tell me he had just
+learned from his lieutenant that I could find no horse to suit me;
+that he had a good one strong enough for my weight, and, he thought,
+even good enough for my needs. He had bought him in St. Louis from the
+quartermaster, and would I oblige him by trying him? He was quite at my
+service, at the government price, for he, being lighter, could easily
+replace him. Did I remember his horse,--his "Fuchs"? "He is good, nice,
+strong horse, an he yoomp!--yei!!"
+
+I did remember his horse, and I had seen him "yoomp." It had long
+been a subject of regret to think that such an animal should be in
+the regiment, yet not on my own picket-line. It was well known that
+great prices had been offered for him, only to make Gluckmansklegge
+fling his eye-glass loose, and grin in derision. "Fuchs is--how you
+call?--'heelty,' an gesund; wenn you like, your Ike will go to my
+company to bring him." I did like, and I had no scruples against
+buying him for one hundred and twenty-five dollars. Ike, a handsome
+contraband, went early the next morning with a halter for the Fuchs,
+and I was up bright and betimes to try him.
+
+I had only seen the horse before under the saddle, perfectly equipped,
+perfectly bitted, and perfectly ridden, an almost ideal charger. There
+was a great firebrand scar on the flat of each shoulder, where he had
+been fired for a cough,--so said Gluckmansklegge;--others intimated
+that this effaced a U. S. brand; but, except this, not a sign of a
+blemish. In form, action, style, color (chestnut), and training he
+was unexceptionably good, and might well excite the envy of all good
+horsemen who saw him _under the saddle_. Knowing him so well, I went
+rather eagerly to the picket-line to refresh myself with the added
+sensation that the actual ownership of such a horse must give.
+
+There stood the new purchase,--a picture of the most abject misery;
+his hind legs drawn under him; the immense muscles of his hips lying
+flabby, like a cart-horse's; his head hanging to the level of his
+knees, and his under-lip drooping; his eyes half shut, and his long
+ears falling out sidewise like a sleepy mule's. I had bought him for a
+safe price, and he would probably do to carry Ike and the saddle-bags;
+but I felt as far as ever from a mount for myself, and went back to my
+tent wiser and no happier than before.
+
+Presently Ike appeared with the coffee, and asked how I liked the new
+horse.
+
+"Not at all."
+
+"Don't ye? well now, I reckon he's a consid'able of a hoss."
+
+I sent him to look at him again, and he came back with a very
+thoughtful air,--evidently he had been impressed. At last he said,
+"Well now, Colonel, I don't reckon you bought that hoss to look at him
+on the picket-line, did ye?"
+
+"No, Ike, or he should be sold out very cheap; but he is not the
+_kind_ of horse I supposed he was; he ought to work in a mule-team."
+
+"Well now, Colonel, mebbe he is; but you can't never tell nothin' about
+a hoss till you get him between ye; and I reckon he's a consid'able of
+a hoss, I reckon he is."
+
+Ike was wise, in his way, and his way was a very horsy one,--so my
+hopes revived a little; and when Gluckmansklegge came up on a capital
+little beast he had been handling (secretly to replace the Fuchs),
+I had the new venture saddled and brought round. He came blundering
+along, head and ears and tail down, and stood like a leathern horse
+for me to mount, Gluckmansklegge dropping his eye-glass and grinning.
+It was as well to find out first as last whether he had anything in
+him or not, and I gathered up the curb-rein, which brought his head
+into superb position and settled him well back upon his haunches; but,
+as the movement had been made with dignity, I gave him both heels,
+firmly,--when we went sailing!--how high I don't know, probably not
+fifteen feet, but it seemed that, and covering a good stretch to the
+front. It was the most enormous lift I had ever had, and (after an
+appreciable time in the air), when he landed square on all four feet,
+it was to strike a spanking, even trot, the bit playing loose in his
+mouth, his head swaying easily with his step, and his tail flying. I
+had never been more amazed in my life than by the wonderful grace and
+agility of this splendid brute. As he trotted along with his high,
+strong, and perfectly cadenced step, he showed in the swing of his head
+all the satisfaction of an athlete turning, conscious, lightly away
+from the footlights, after his especial _tour de force_.
+
+As Gluckmansklegge rode up, he said, "Well, Col-o-nel, how you like?
+Nice pretty strong horse, what?"
+
+And then, his English failing him, he fell, through an attempt at
+French, into German, in which his tongue was far more ready than my
+ear. Still it was easy to gather enough to understand some of the
+processes by which the animal's natural qualifications for his work had
+been developed into such unusual accomplishments; and then he glided
+into the complimentary assertion that no one but the colonel of his
+regiment could ever have hoped to buy him at any price,--and of course
+he did not consider it a sale. His original outlay, which he could
+not afford to lose, had been reimbursed; but the true value of the
+horse, his education, he was only too glad to give me. And then, the
+pleasure of seeing his colonel suitably mounted, and the satisfaction
+of seeing the horse properly ridden, really threw the obligation on
+his side. Then, with his inimitable _naivete_, he not only expressed,
+but demonstrated, in every look and gesture, more delight in watching
+our movements than he had felt in his own riding. "Praise a horseman
+for his horsemanship, and he will ride to the Devil." Gluckmansklegge
+(I did not suspect him of a desire for promotion) pointed to a strong
+rail-fence near by, and suggested that the combination of man and
+horse for that sort of thing was unusual. Whether it was a banter or
+a compliment, it would have been impossible for any man who properly
+esteemed himself and his riding to stop to consider. Turned toward the
+fence, the Fuchs, checking his speed, seemed to creep toward it, as a
+cat would, making it very uncertain what he proposed; but as he came
+nearer to it, that willingness to leap that an accustomed rider will
+always recognize communicated itself to me, and, with perfect judgment,
+but with a force and spirit I had never hoped to meet in a horse of
+this world, he carried me over the enormous height, and landed like a
+deer, among the stumps and brush on the other side, and trotted gayly
+away, athlete-like again, happier and prouder than ever horse was
+before.
+
+Sitting that evening at my tent door, opposite the spring, bragging,
+as the custom is, over the new purchase, it occurred to me that that
+stream of water and that bit of horse-flesh had some qualities alike;
+so I christened the latter "Roubie d'Eaux," which was soon translated
+and shortened to "Ruby,"--a name henceforth familiar throughout the
+regiment.
+
+To become my property was the only thing needed to make him perfect,
+for Ike was born in a racing stud in Kentucky, and had practised all
+the arts of the craft, up to the time when, being both jockey and "the
+stakes" in a race he rode, he was lost to a Missouri gentleman of
+fortune, and became a body-servant. He was once confidential:--
+
+"Well, now, Colonel, you see, this is how it was: I hadn't nothin'
+ag'in my master,--he was a right nice man; but then, you see, he
+drinked, and I didn't know what might become of me some time. Then,
+you see, I knowed this man was stiddy, an' he'd jess done bought a
+yallar gal I kinder had a notion for, an' so,--don't ye see why?--well,
+the hoss could have won the _race_ fast enough, but then, you see, my
+master,--well, he was a drinkin' kind of a man, an' I thought I might
+as well fix it. I knowed I was up for stakes, an' that's how I come to
+Missouri; I ain't no Missouri man _born_, but that's how it was."
+
+He had become a good body-servant without forgetting his stable
+training, and his horses bore testimony to his skill and fidelity.
+After going through the routine of a well-regulated stable, he gave
+each horse a half-hour's stroking with the flat of his hands, brisk and
+invigorating; and the result was a more blooming condition and more
+vigorous health than is often seen in horses on a campaign. The best
+substitute that could be secured for a stable was a very heavy canvas
+blanket, covering the horse from his ears to his tail and down to his
+knees, water-proof and wind-proof. It was a standing entertainment with
+the less dignified members of the mess to invite attention to Ruby
+as he stood moping under this hideous housing. Certainly I never saw
+him thus without thinking that his time had at last come, and that he
+surely would never again be able to carry me creditably. Yet, as Ike's
+devotion continued, he grew better and better, commanding daily more of
+the respect and admiration of all who knew him, and attaching himself
+to me more and more as we learned each other's ways.
+
+One never loves but one horse entirely, and so Ruby never quite filled
+Vixen's place; but as a serviceable friend, he was all that could be
+desired. The unsupplied want of my life, that had made me restless
+and discontented, was now satisfied, and my duties became easy, and
+my pastimes (the principal times of South Missouri warfare) entirely
+agreeable.
+
+It was no slight addition to these sources of contentment to feel that
+the command had at last awakened to a sense of its dereliction, and
+was fast reforming its ways. I had hardly owned Ruby for a fortnight
+before the old cheerfulness and alacrity returned to the regiment, and
+by the time we broke up our camp on the Roubie d'Eaux and went over to
+Lebanon for the shooting season, the entire organization was in a most
+satisfactory condition.
+
+Our life in Lebanon was an episode of the war that we shall not
+soon forget. To the best of my knowledge and belief, after Price had
+retreated from Pea Ridge, the only organized forces of armed Rebels
+to be found north of the White River were local bands of jay-hawkers,
+whose rebellion was mainly directed against the laws of property,
+and the actuating motive of whose military movements was "nags." The
+stealing of horses, with the consequent application of Lynch law, was
+all that the native male population had to keep them out of mischief,
+for weeks and weeks together. There was just enough of this sort of
+armed lawlessness to furnish us with a semblance of duty; not enough
+seriously to interrupt our more regular avocations.
+
+Lebanon is on the high table-land of the Ozarks, in the heart of a
+country flowing with prairie-hens and wild turkeys, and bountifully
+productive of the more humdrum necessaries of life. Thanks to the
+fleeing of Rebel families, we found comfortable quarters without too
+severely oppressing those who had remained. What with moving the
+court-house away from the public square, leaving the space free for a
+parade, and substituting a garrison flag-staff for the town pump, we
+kept our men from rusting; and when, after a time, we had established
+a comfortable post-hospital and a commodious military prison, Lebanon
+was as complete and well-ordered a station as could be found in
+South Missouri. I had the questionable honor and the unquestionable
+comfort of holding its command from the end of January to the end of
+April,--three dreamy months, that seem now to have been passed in a
+shooting-lodge, under favorable auspices.
+
+As a legacy of the "Hundred Days," when the "Fourth Missouri" was the
+"Fremont Hussars," we had an able-bodied and extremely well-selected
+regimental band, that soothed our over-tasked senses when we came in
+from our work in the fields, gathering where our enemies had sown, and
+(under the suspended game-laws of the State) shooting grouse and quail
+in the early spring.
+
+Naturally, most of my official duties were such as could be performed
+by an extremely well-regulated adjutant; and I usually passed his busy
+half-hour (in private) with Ruby. There had been an impetuosity about
+the horse at the outset which it was desirable to quell, and I rode him
+regularly in a nicely fenced kitchen-garden, where, after he learned
+that fences are not always intended for leaping-bars, he fell slowly
+into the routine of the training-school, and easily acquired a perfect
+self-command and _aplomb_ that enabled him, under all circumstances, to
+await his rider's instructions.
+
+I wish that less account had been made, in the writings of those
+whose horse-stories have preceded mine, of the specified feats of
+their animals. The _role_ of a horse's performances is necessarily
+limited, and it is probably impossible for a well-constituted mind to
+recite the simple story of his deeds without seeming to draw largely
+on the imagination. Consequently, an unexaggerated account of what
+Ruby actually did (and I cannot bring my mind to an embellishment of
+the truth) would hardly interest a public whose fancy has been thus
+pampered and spoiled. But for this, these pages could be filled with
+instances of his strength and agility that would almost tax belief.
+Suffice it to say that while, like most good high leapers, he would
+cover but a moderate breadth of water, he would get over anything
+reasonable in the shape of a fence that could be found about the town.
+
+I was a heavy weight,--riding nearly two hundred pounds,--and
+necessarily rode with judgment. If there was a low place in a fence,
+we never chose a high one; but, at the same time, if there were no
+low places, we took the best we could find. Ruby seemed to know that
+the two of us were solid enough to break through any ordinary pile of
+rails, and what we could not jump over we jumped _at_. More than once
+did he carry away the top rail of a snake fence with his knees, and
+land fair and square on the other side; but it was a very high leap
+that made this necessary.
+
+He would jump on to the porch of the quartermaster's office (approached
+from the ground by four steps), and then jump over the hand-rail and
+land on the ground below again, almost wagging his tail with delight at
+the feat.
+
+His ear was quicker than mine for the peeping of quail and for the
+drumming of grouse, and, in the absence of a good dog, there is no
+doubt that my pot (for which alone I have been said to hunt) was better
+filled by reason of his intelligence in the field, and because he would
+allow one to shoot from the saddle. The birds never mistook me for a
+sportsman until I was quite in among them, blazing away.
+
+In coming home from the prairie, we generally rode round by the way of
+a certain sunken garden that stood a couple of feet below the level
+of the road. A five-foot picket-fence that stood at the roadside had
+fallen over toward the garden, so that its top was hardly four feet
+higher than the road. This made the most satisfactory leap we ever
+took,--the long, sailing descent, and the safe landing on sandy loam,
+satisfied so completely one's prudent love of danger.
+
+I think I missed this leap more than anything at Lebanon when, finally,
+we set out for Arkansas.
+
+We made our first considerable halt early in May, at Batesville,
+on the White River,--a lovely, rose-grown village, carrying, in the
+neatly kept home of its New England secessionists, evidence that
+they remembered their native land, where, in their day, before the
+age of railroads, the "village" flourished in all its freshness and
+simplicity. It had now acquired the picturesque dilapidation, in the
+manner of fences and gates and defective window-panes, that marked
+the Southern domicile during the war. Ruby had strained himself quite
+seriously during the march, and had been left to come on slowly with
+the quartermaster's train. This left me quite free for the social life,
+such as it was, to which we--the only available men that had been seen
+there since Price gathered his forces at Springfield--were welcomed
+with a reserved cordiality. Our facilities for forming a correct
+opinion of society were not especially good, but I fancied I should
+have passed my time to as good advantage in the saddle.
+
+We soon left for an active expedition in the direction of Little Rock,
+of which it is only necessary to say, here, that it lasted about a
+month, and brought the writer acquainted with some very unsatisfactory
+horses,--a fact which heightened his pleasure, on striking the White
+River bottom again, at finding that Ruby had been brought over the
+ferry to meet him. Tired as I was, I took a glorious brisk trot through
+the Canebrake Road, with a couple of leaps over fallen trees, that
+revived the old emotions and made a man of me again.
+
+While we lay at Batesville we were unusually active in the matter of
+drill and reorganization; and this, with our engagements in the town,
+kept us too busy for much recreation; but Ludlow and I managed to work
+in a daily swim in the White River, with old saddles on our horses,
+and scant clothing on our persons. Talk of aquatic sports! there is
+no royal bath without a plucky horse to assist; and a swim across
+the swift current at Batesville, with a horse like Ruby snorting and
+straining at every stroke, belittled even the leaping at Lebanon.
+
+From Batesville we commenced our memorable march to join the fleet
+that had just passed Memphis, following down the left bank of the river
+to Augusta, and then striking across the cotton country to Helena,--a
+march on which we enjoyed the rarest picturesqueness of plantation
+life, and suffered enough from heat and hunger and thirst, and
+stifling, golden dust to more than pay for it.
+
+Helena was a pestiferous swamp, worth more than an active campaign to
+our enemies, filling our hospitals, and furrowing the levee bank with
+graves. It was too hot for much drilling, and we kept our better horses
+in order by daybreak races. With the local fever feeling its way into
+my veins, I was too listless to care much for any diversion; but Ike
+came to me one evening to say that he "reckoned" Ruby was as good a
+horse as anybody had in the "camps," and he might as well take a hand
+in the games. I told him I had no objection to his being run, if he
+could find a suitable boy, but that both he and I were too heavy for
+race-riding.
+
+"I don't weigh only about a hundred and a half," said the ambitious man.
+
+"Well, suppose you don't, that is ten pounds too much."
+
+"I reckon a man can ride ten pound lighter 'n he is if he knows how
+to ride; anyhow, if Rube can't skin anything around here, I don't know
+nothin' about horses."
+
+"Ike, did you ever run that horse?"
+
+"Well, Colonel, now you ask me, I did jest give Dwight's darkey a
+little brush once."
+
+Conquering my indignation and my scruples, I went over, just for the
+honor of the establishment, and made up a race for the next day.
+
+I have seen crack race-horses in my time, but I never saw more
+artistic riding nor more capital running than that summer morning on
+the River Road at Helena, just as the sun began to gild the muddy
+Mississippi. The satisfaction of this conquest, and the activity with
+which new engagements were offered by ambitious lieutenants, who little
+knew the stuff my man and horse were made of, kept off my fever for
+some weeks; but I steadily declined all opportunity of racing with
+horses outside of our command, for I had been reared in a school of
+Puritan severity, and had never quite overcome my convictions against
+the public turf. A corporal of an "Injeanny rege_ment_" took occasion
+to crow lustily--so I heard--because "one of them French coveys" was
+afraid to run him a quarter for five dollars. It appeared that a
+cleanly European was always supposed by this gentry to be French; and
+in the army at large I was better known by the company I kept than by
+my New England characteristics.
+
+Naturally, Ike thought that, while Ruby was engaged in this more
+legitimate occupation, he ought not to be ridden for mere pleasure;
+and it was only when a visitor was to be entertained, or when I went
+out on plea of duty, that I could steal an opportunity to leap him;
+but he took one fence that fairly did him credit. It was a snake fence
+measuring four feet and two inches, with a deep ditch on each side cut
+close to the projecting angles of the rails. Ruby carried me over the
+first ditch into the angle between the rails, then over the fence into
+the narrow space on the other side, and then over the second ditch into
+the field. It was the most perfect combination of skill, strength, and
+judgment that was possible to horse-flesh; and I think Gluckmansklegge,
+who was with me and had suggested the venture, despaired of ever
+getting his promotion by any fair means, when we rejoined him by the
+return leap and rode safely to camp.
+
+Unhappily, even entire satisfaction with one's horse is powerless to
+ward off such malaria as that of the camp at Helena, and in due time I
+fell ill with the fever. The horse was turned over to the care of the
+quartermaster, and Ike and I came wearily home on sick-leave.
+
+Late in the autumn we returned to St. Louis, where one of the German
+officers told me that the regiment had joined Davidson's army at "Pilot
+K-nopp"; and after the Hun, our new adjutant, arrived from the East, we
+set out for headquarters, and took command of the cavalry brigade of
+Davidson's army.
+
+From November until January we were tossed about from post to post,
+wearing out our horses, wearying our men, and accomplishing absolutely
+nothing of value beyond the destruction of an enormous amount of
+the rough forage, which would otherwise have been used to feed
+"nags,"--stolen or to be stolen,--and would have thus tended to foster
+the prevailing vice of the region.
+
+At last we settled down in a pleasant camp at Thomasville,--a good
+twelve miles away from Davidson,--and were at rest; it was only those
+near him who suffered from his fitful caprices, and he was now encamped
+with the infantry.
+
+Pleasant as we found it with our little duty and much sport, I can
+never look back to Thomasville without sorrow. To say that I had
+acquired a tenderness for Ruby would not be strictly just; but I felt
+for him all the respect and admiration and fondness that is possible
+short of love. Vix had been my heroine, and my only one; but Ruby was
+my hero, and I depended on him for my duty and my pleasure more than I
+knew. With his full measure of intelligence he had learned exactly his
+_role_, and he was always eager, whenever occasion offered, to show the
+world what a remarkably fine horse I had,--being himself conscious, not
+only of his unusual virtues, but, no less, of the praise they elicited.
+
+One sunny Southern day, toward the end of January, Davidson had ridden
+over, with his following, to dine with us; and as we were sitting
+before our mess-tent, mellow with after-dinner talk of our guns and
+our dogs and our horses, the General was good enough to remember that
+he had seen me riding a chestnut that he thought much too finely bred
+for field work: had I been able to keep him? Then Ruby was discussed,
+and all his successes were recalled, first by one friend and then by
+another, until Davidson needed ocular proof of our truthfulness.
+
+Ike had taken the hint, and brought Ruby round in due time,--glistening
+like gold in the slanting rays of the setting sun, but blundering along
+with his head down and ears drooping in his old, dismal way.
+
+"O no, I don't mean that horse," said Davidson; "I mean a very
+high-strung horse I have seen you ride on the march."
+
+"Very well, General, that is the animal; he keeps his strings loose
+when he is not at his work."
+
+"No, I have seen you riding a far better horse than that; I am too old
+a cavalryman to be caught by such chaff."
+
+To the great glee of the Hun, whose faith in Ruby was unbounded,
+Davidson's whole staff turned the laugh on me for trying to deceive the
+General just because he had been dining.
+
+I mounted, and started off with one of Ruby's enormous lifts, that
+brought the whole company to their feet. It was the supreme moment with
+him. Full of consciousness, as though he knew the opportunity would
+never come again, and quivering in anticipation of his triumph, he was
+yet true to his training, and held himself subject to my least impulse.
+
+We had lain in our camp for more than a week, and there was not a
+vestige left of the recently substantial fences,--only the suggestive
+and conspicuous gateways that stood to mark the march of our armies
+from the Chesapeake to the Indian Nation. But Ruby built fences in his
+imagination higher than any he had ever faced, and cleared them without
+a scratch, landing close as though the Helena ditch were still to be
+taken.
+
+It would take long to tell all he did and how perfectly he did it; he
+went back at last to his canvas blanket, loaded with adulation, and as
+happy as it is given a horse to be.
+
+In his leaping he had started a shoe, and Ike took him in the morning
+to the smith (who had taken possession of an actual forge), to have it
+reset. A moment later, the Hun cried, "My God, Colonel, look at Ruby!"
+
+Hobbling along with one hind foot drawn up with pain, he was making
+his last mournful march, and we laid him that day to rest,--as true a
+friend and as faithful a fellow as ever wore a chestnut coat.
+
+He had reared in the shop, parted his halter, and fallen under a
+bench, breaking his thigh far up above the stifle.
+
+
+
+
+WETTSTEIN.
+
+
+It is a pleasant thing to be a colonel of cavalry in active
+field-service. There are circumstances of authority and responsibility
+that fan the latent spark of barbarism which, however dull, glows in
+all our breasts, and which generations of republican civilization
+have been powerless to quench. We may not have confessed it even
+to ourselves; but on looking back to the years of the war, we
+must recognize many things that patted our vanity greatly on the
+back,--things so different from all the dull routine of equality
+and fraternity of home, that those four years seem to belong to a
+dreamland, over which the haze of the life before them and of the
+life after them draws a misty veil. Equality and Fraternity! a pretty
+sentiment, yes, and full of sensible and kindly regard for all mankind,
+and full of hope for the men who are to come after us; but Superiority
+and Fraternity! who shall tell all the secret emotions this implies? To
+be the head of the brotherhood, with the unremitted clank of a guard's
+empty scabbard trailing before one's tent-door day and night; with the
+standard of the regiment proclaiming the house of chief authority;
+with the respectful salute of all passers, and the natural obedience
+of all members of the command; with the shade of deference that even
+comrades show to superior rank; and with that just sufficient check
+upon coarseness during the jovial bouts of the headquarters' mess,
+making them not less genial, but void of all offence,--living in this
+atmosphere, one almost feels the breath of feudal days coming modified
+through the long tempestuous ages to touch his cheek, whispering to him
+that the savage instinct of the sires has not been, and never will be,
+quite civilized out of the sons. And then the thousand men, and the
+yearly million that they cost, while they fill the cup of the colonel's
+responsibility (sometimes to overflowing), and give him many heavy
+trials,--they are his own men; their usefulness is almost of his own
+creation, and their renown is his highest glory.
+
+I may not depict the feelings of others; but I find in the recollection
+of my own service--as succeeding years dull its details and cast the
+nimbus of distance about it--the source of emotions which differ widely
+from those to which our modern life has schooled us.
+
+One of the colonel's constant attendants is the chief bugler, or,
+as he is called in hussar Dutch, the "Stabstrompaytr"; mine was the
+prince of Trompaytrs, and his name was Wettstein. He was a Swiss, whose
+native language was a mixture of guttural French and mincing German.
+English was an impossible field to him. He had learned to say "yes" and
+"matches"; but not one other of our words could he ever lay his tongue
+to, except the universal "damn." But for his bugle and his little gray
+mare, I should never have had occasion to know his worth. Music filled
+every pore of his Alpine soul, and his wonderful Swiss "Retreat" must
+ring to this day in the memory of every man of the regiment whose
+thoughts turn again to the romantic campaign of South Missouri. What
+with other buglers was a matter of routine training was with him an
+inspiration. All knew well enough the meaning of the commands that
+the company trumpets stammered or blared forth; but when they rang
+from Wettstein's horn, they carried with them a _vim_ and energy that
+secured their prompt execution; and his note in the wild Ozark Hills
+would mark the headquarters of the "Vierte Missouri" for miles around.
+From a hill-top, half a mile in advance of the marching command, I
+have turned the regiment into its camping-ground and dismounted it in
+perfect order by the melodious telegraphy of Wettstein's brazen lips
+alone.
+
+That other chief attribute of his, Klitschka, his little beast,
+stayed longer with me than his bugle did, and is hardly less identified
+with the varied reminiscences of my army life. I bought her, as a
+prize, with the original mount of the regiment, in Fremont's time,
+and was mildly informed by that officer that I must be careful how
+I accepted many such animals from the contractor, though a few for
+the smaller men might answer. Asboth, Fremont's chief of staff, with
+a scornful rolling up of his cataract of a mustache, and a shrug of
+his broad, thin shoulders, said, "Whyfor you buy such horses? What
+your bugler ride, it is not a horse, it is a cat." His remark was not
+intended as a question, and it ended the conversation. Months after
+that, he eagerly begged for the nine-lived Klitschka for one of his
+orderlies; being refused him, she remained good to the end. She was an
+animal that defied every rule by which casual observers test the merit
+of a horse; but analytically considered she was nearly perfect. Better
+legs, a better body, and a better head, it is rare to see, than she
+had. But she lacked the arched neck and the proud step that she needed
+all the more because of her small size. By no means showy in figure
+or in action, it took a second look to see her perfect fitness for
+her work. Her color was iron-gray, and no iron could be tougher than
+she was; while her full, prominent eye and ample brain-room, and her
+quick paper-thin ear, told of courage and intelligence that made her
+invaluable throughout four years of hard and often dangerous service.
+Like many other ill-favored little people, she was very lovable, and
+Wettstein loved her like a woman. He would never hesitate to relax
+those strict rules of conduct by which German cavalrymen are supposed
+to govern themselves, if it was a question of stealing forage for
+Klitschka; and he was (amiable fellow!) never so happy as when, from a
+scanty supply in the country, he had taken enough oat-sheaves to bed
+her in and almost cover her up, while other horses of the command must
+go hungry; and was never so shaken in his regard for me as when I made
+him give up all but double rations for her.
+
+Double rations she often earned, for Wettstein was a heavy youth,
+with a constitutional passion for baggage out of all proportion to
+his means of transportation. Mounted for the march, he was an odd
+sight. Little Klitschka's back, with his immense rolls of blankets and
+clothing before and behind, looked like a dromedary's. Planted between
+the humps, straight as a gun-barrel, the brightest of bugles suspended
+across his back by its tasselled yellow braid, slashed like a harlequin
+over the breast, his arms chevroned with gorgeous gold,--Wettstein,
+with his cap-front turned up so as to let the sun fall full on his
+frank blue eyes and his resolute blond mustache, was the very picture
+of a cavalry bugler in active campaign.
+
+Smoking, gabbling, singing, rollicking, from morning until night,
+and still on until morning again if need be, he never lost spirit nor
+temper. He seemed to absorb sunshine enough during the day to keep
+every one bright around him all night. When at last his bugle had been
+stilled forever, we long missed the cheer of his indomitable gayety;
+wearying service became more irksome than while his bubbling mirth had
+tempered its dulness; and even little Klitschka, although she remained
+an example of steady pluck, had never so potent an influence as while
+he had put his own unfailing mettle into her heels. After she was
+bequeathed to me, she was always most useful, but never so gay and
+frisky as while she carried her own devoted groom. No day was too long
+for her and no road too heavy; her brisk trot knew no failing, but she
+refused ever again to form the personal attachment that had sealed her
+and Wettstein to each other.
+
+The two of them together, like the fabled Centaur, made the complete
+creature. He with the hardened frame and bright nature of his Alpine
+race, and she with her veins full of the mustang blood of the Rocky
+Mountains, were fitted to each other as almost never were horse and
+rider before. Their performances were astonishing. In addition to a
+constant attendance on his commander (who, riding without baggage,
+and of no heavier person than Wettstein himself, sometimes fagged out
+three good horses between one morning and the next), the Trompaytr
+yet volunteered for all sorts of extra service,--carried messages
+over miles of bad road to the general's camp, gave riding-lessons and
+music-lessons to the company buglers, and then--fear of the guard-house
+and fear of capture always unheeded--he never missed an opportunity for
+the most hazardous and most laborious foraging.
+
+He was a thorough soldier,--always "for duty," always cleanly, always
+handsome and cheery, and heedlessly brave. If detected in a fault
+(and he was, as I have hinted, an incorrigible forager), he took
+his punishment like a man, and stole milk for himself or fodder for
+Klitschka at the next convenient (or inconvenient) opportunity, with an
+imperturbability that no punishment could reach.
+
+Once, when supplies were short, he sent me, from the guard-house where
+he had been confined for getting them, a dozen bundles of corn-blades
+for my horses; not as a bribe, but because he would not allow the
+incidents of discipline to disturb our friendly relations; and in the
+matter of fodder in scarce times he held me as a helpless pensioner,
+dependent on his bounty. When in arrest by my order, his "Pon chour,
+Herr Oberist," was as cordial and happy as when he strolled free past
+my tent. Altogether, I never saw his like before or since. The good
+fortune to get such a bugle, such a soldier, and such a mount combined,
+comes but once in the lifetime of the luckiest officer. It was only
+his uncouth tongue that kept him from being pilfered from me by every
+general who had the power to "detail" him to his own headquarters.
+
+So universal, by the way, was this petty vice of commanding officers,
+that one was never safe until he adopted the plan, in selecting a
+staff officer, of securing his promise to resign from the service,
+point-blank, if ordered to other duty, and more than one offended
+general has been made indignant by this policy. With Wettstein, I felt
+perfectly easy, for the average capacity of brigadier-generals stopped
+far short of the analysis of his dual jargon. Several tried him for
+a day, but they found that his comprehension was no better than his
+speech, and that his manifest ability was a sealed book to them. He
+always came home by nightfall with a chuckle, and "Le general versteht
+mich nicht. Je blase 'marrrsch' fuer 'halt.'"
+
+So it was that, for a couple of years, this trusty fellow trotted at
+my heels through rain and shine, by day and by night, with his face
+full of glee, and his well-filled canteen at the service of our little
+staff. Mud and mire, ditches and fences, were all one to him and
+Klitschka; and in Vix's day they followed her lead over many a spot
+that the others had to take by flank movement.
+
+Our work in Missouri was but little more than the work of subsistence.
+We were a part of an army too large for any Rebel force in that region
+to attack, and too unwieldy to pursue guerillas with much effect. But
+now and then we made a little scout that varied our otherwise dull
+lives; and at such times Wettstein always attached himself to the most
+dangerous patrolling party, and Klitschka was usually the first to
+bring back news of the trifling encounters.
+
+At last, in February, 1863, when we had lain for a month in delicious
+idleness in the heart of a rich country, literally flowing with
+poultry and corn-fodder, I, being then in command of a division of
+cavalry, received an order from Davidson to select six hundred of the
+best-mounted of my men, and to attack Marmaduke, who was recruiting,
+ninety miles away, at Batesville on the White River in Arkansas. His
+main body, three thousand five hundred strong, lay in the "Oil-Trough
+Bottom," on the other side of the river. A brigade of Western infantry
+was to march as far as Salem (thirty miles), and to support us if
+necessary; though we afterward found that at the only moment when
+we might have had grave occasion to depend on them, they were, with
+an inconsistency that was not the least attribute of our commanding
+officer, withdrawn without notice to us.
+
+We were to go in light marching order, carrying only the necessary
+clothing, and rations of salt and coffee. Wettstein's ideas of
+lightness differing from mine, I had to use some authority to rid poor
+Klitschka of saucepans, extra boots, and such trash; and after all,
+the rascal had, under the plea of a cold, requiring extra blankets,
+smuggled a neatly sewn sausage of corn, weighing some fifteen pounds,
+into one of his rolls. Eager men, too, whose horses were out of trim,
+had to be discarded, and the whole detail to be thoroughly overhauled.
+But the jovial anticipation of seeing Batesville once more--a New
+England village planted on a charming hillside in Arkansas, where we
+had sojourned with Curtis the summer before, and where we all had the
+pleasant acquaintance that even an enemy makes in a town from which
+the native men have long been gone, and only the women remain--made
+the work of preparation go smoothly, and long before dawn Wettstein's
+bugle summoned the details from the several camps. There was a ringing
+joyousness in his call, that spoke of the cosey, roaring fire of a
+certain Batesville kitchen to which his bright face and his well-filled
+haversack had long ago made him welcome, and prospective feasting gave
+an added trill to his blast.
+
+The little detachments trotted gayly into line, officers were assigned
+for special duty, temporary divisions were told off, and a working
+organization was soon completed. Before the sun was up, such a Ra,
+t't'ta, t't'ta, _t't'ta_! as South Missouri had never heard before,
+broke the line by twos from the right, and we were off for a promising
+trip. Marmaduke we knew of old, and personal cowardice would have
+deterred no one from joining our party, for he could be reached from
+our stronger army only by a complete surprise; and in a country where
+every woman and child (white, I mean) was his friend and our enemy, a
+surprise, over ninety miles of bad roads, seemed out of the question.
+Indeed, before we had made a half of the distance, one of his flying
+scouts told a negro woman by the roadside, as he checked his run to
+water his horse, "There's a hell's-mint o' Yanks a comin' over the
+mountain, and I must git to Marmyjuke"; and to Marmaduke he "got," half
+a day ahead of us, only to be laughed at for a coward who had been
+frightened by a foraging-party.
+
+The second night brought us to Evening Shade, a little village where
+one Captain Smith was raising a company. They had all gone, hours ahead
+of us, but had left their supplies and their fires behind them, and
+these, with the aid of a grist-mill (for which an Illinois regiment
+furnished a miller), gave us a bountiful supper. At daybreak we set out
+for our last day's march, still supposing that Marmaduke's men would
+put the river between themselves and us before night, but confident
+of comfortable quarters at Batesville. A few miles out, we began to
+pick up Rebel stragglers, and Wettstein soon came rattling through the
+woods, from a house to which he had been allowed to go for milk, with
+the story of a sick officer lodged there. Following his lead with a
+surgeon and a small escort, I found the captain of the Evening Shade
+company lying in a raging fever, with which he had found it impossible
+to ride, and nearly dead with terror lest we should hang him at once.
+His really beautiful young wife, who had gone to enliven his recruiting
+labors, was in tears over his impending fate. While we were talking
+with him concerning his parole, she bribed Wettstein with a royal pair
+of Mexican spurs to save his life, evidently thinking from his display
+of finery that he was a major-general at the very least. The kind
+fellow buckled the spurs on my heels, and they evidently gave me new
+consequence in his eyes as we rode on our way.
+
+Presently we struck a party of about twenty-five, under a Captain
+Mosby, who had been making a circuit after conscripts and had had no
+news of us. After a running fight, during which there occurred some
+casualties on the other side, we captured the survivors of the party
+and sent them to the rear.
+
+From midday on, we heard rumors of a sally in strong force from
+Batesville, and were compelled to move cautiously,--straggling parties
+of Rebel scouts serving to give credibility to the story. At sunset
+we were within six miles of the town; and, halting in the deep snow
+of a large farm-yard, I sent a picked party of thirty, under Rosa, to
+secure the ferry, if possible,--Wettstein and Klitschka accompanying to
+bring back word of the result. After two anxious hours, he came into
+camp with a note from Rosa: "Marmaduke is over the river and has the
+ferry-boat with him; three of his men killed. Wettstein did bravely."
+The poor fellow had a bad cut on his arm and was in pain, but not a
+moment would he give himself until brave little Klitschka, smothered in
+bright straw, was filling herself from the smuggled bag of corn. Then
+he came to the surgeon and had his wounded arm duly dressed. Although
+evidently suffering and weak from loss of blood, he gave us a cheering
+account of Rosa's fight, and dwelt fondly on the supper he had bespoken
+for us at good Mrs. ----'s house, where we had quartered in the summer.
+At nine o'clock, after Klitschka had fed and the patrols had come in,
+we set out on our march. It was still snowing hard, and even the dead
+men that marked Rosa's recent ride were fast being shrouded in purest
+white. One of them Wettstein pointed out as the man with whom he had
+crossed sabres, and he asked permission to stay with the party detailed
+to bury him, for he had been a "braff homme." With his tender sympathy
+for friend or foe, he was a truer mourner than a dead soldier often
+gets from the ranks of his enemy. Even this sad ride came to an end, as
+all things must, and at the edge of the town soldierly Rosa stood, to
+report that the pickets were posted and our quarters ready. Giving him
+a fresh detail to relieve his pickets, and asking his company at our
+midnight supper, we pushed on to our chosen house. Here we found all
+in order, save that the young lady of the family had so hastily put on
+the jacket bearing the U. S. buttons of her last summer's conquests,
+that she failed quite to conceal the C. S. buttons on a prettier one
+under it. She and her mother scolded us for driving the Rebel beaux
+from town, when there was to have been a grand farewell ball only the
+next night; but they seemed in no wise impressed with regret for the
+friends who had been killed and wounded in the chase. It turned out
+that Marmaduke had grown tired of reports that we were marching on him
+in force, and would not believe it now until his own men rode into
+town at nightfall with the marks of Rosa's sabres on their heads. The
+place had been filled with the officers of his command, and he with
+them, come for their parting flirtations before the ball. They were to
+march to Little Rock, and their men were nearly all collected in the
+"Bottom," over the river. On this sudden proof of the attack, they made
+a stampede for the flat-boat of the rope-ferry, and nearly sunk it by
+over-crowding, the hindmost men cutting the rope and swimming their
+horses across the wintry torrent.
+
+We had full possession of the town, and were little disturbed by
+the dropping shots from the Rebel side. We visited on our unfaithful
+friends such punishment as enforced hospitality could compass, and,
+on the whole, we hadn't a bad "time." The morning after our arrival
+we levied such contributions of supplies as were necessary for our
+return march, and, in order that the return might not look like a
+retreat, we loaded two wagons with hogsheads of sugar (which would be
+welcome in Davidson's commissariat), and made every arrangement for the
+establishment of the camping of the whole army in the country back of
+the town; for our force was so small that, with our tired horses, it
+would have been imprudent to turn our backs to Marmaduke's little army,
+if he supposed us to be alone.
+
+Keeping the town well picketed and making much show of laying out an
+encampment, we started the teams and the main body of the command at
+nightfall, holding back a hundred men for a cover until a later hour.
+
+During the evening the Rebels on the south side of the river became
+suspiciously quiet, and there was, apparently, some new movement on
+foot. The only possible chance for an attack was by Magnus's ferry,
+ten miles below, where the boat was so small and the river so wide
+that not more than twenty horses could be crossed in an hour, and our
+sharpshooters were sufficient to prevent the removal of the Batesville
+boat to that point. Still it was important to know what was going on,
+and especially important to prevent even a scouting-party of the enemy
+from harassing the rear of our tired column by the shorter road from
+Magnus's to Evening Shade; and I started at nine o'clock (when the moon
+rose), with twenty men, to go round that way, directing the remainder
+of the rear-guard to follow the main body at midnight.
+
+The ride to Magnus's was without other adventure than bad roads and
+almost impassable bayous always entail, and in a few hours we reached
+the plantation, where I had a former ally in an old negro who had done
+us good service during Curtis's campaign. He said that the Rebels had
+left the Bottom, and were going to Little Rock, but, as a precaution
+he took a canoe and crossed over to the house of another negro on the
+south bank, and returned with a confirmation of his opinion. As it
+was very important to know whether the only enemy of Davidson's army
+had really withdrawn from his front, and, as this might be definitely
+learned through the assistance of an old scout who lived in the edge of
+the Bottom, it seemed best to cross the river to give him instructions
+for his work.
+
+I took Ruby, my best horse. He was a sure reliance under all
+circumstances, and he and I knew each other perfectly. We were at home
+in every foot-path in the country, having had many a summer's swim in
+this very river; and now, accompanied only by Wettstein and Klitschka,
+I went on to the ferry-boat. It was what is known as a "swing" ferry. A
+stout rope is stretched between trees on the opposite shores, and the
+boat is attached to a couple of pulleys arranged to traverse the length
+of this rope. The attaching cords--one at each end of the up-stream
+side of the boat--are long enough to allow it to swing some rods down
+the stream; by shortening one of the ropes and lengthening the other,
+the boat is placed at an angle with the swift current, which propels it
+toward one shore or the other, the pulleys keeping pace in their course
+on the main rope.
+
+The main rope was rough from long use, and often the pulleys would
+halt in their course, until the pull of the advancing boat dragged them
+free. Then the rickety craft, shivering from end to end, would make a
+rapid shoot, until another defective place in the rope brought her to
+again. At each vibration, the horses nearly lost their feet, and the
+surging stream almost sent its muddy water over the gunwale. It was a
+long and anxious trip,--the rotten guy-rope hardly serving to hold us
+to our course. At last we reached the shore and rode on to Craikill's
+house in the Bottom. He had been "conscripted," and forced to go with
+the army, so his wife told us, and she had seen him march with the rest
+on the Fairview Road for Little Rock. The last bird had flown, and we
+could safely march back at our leisure.
+
+Wettstein filled his pipe, emptied his haversack for the benefit of
+Craikill's hungry children, and, cheery as ever, followed me to the
+ferry. On the way over he had been as still as a mouse, for he was too
+old a soldier to give an enemy any sign of our approach. But, as we
+set out on the return trip, in the cold moonlight, he sang the "Ranz
+des Vaches," fondled his little mare, and, unmindful of his wounded
+arm, gave way to the flow of spirits that the past few days' duty had
+checked. I never knew him more gay and delightful; and, as we stood
+leaning on our saddles and chatting together, I congratulated myself
+upon the possession of such a perpetual sunbeam.
+
+We were barely half-way across, when, suddenly, coming out of the
+darkness, riding half hidden in the boiling, whirling tide, a huge
+floating tree struck the boat with a thud that parted the rotten
+guy-rope, and carried us floating down the stream. For a moment there
+seemed no danger, but a branch of the tree had caught the corner of the
+boat, and the pulleys had become entangled in the rope. When this had
+been drawn to its full length, and the tree felt the strain, the boat
+dipped to the current, filled, and sank under our feet. I called to
+Wettstein to take Klitschka by the tail, but it was too late; he had
+grasped the saddle with the desperation of a drowning man, and made
+her fairly helpless. The boat soon passed from under us, and, relieved
+of our weight, came to the surface at our side; but, bringing the rope
+against poor Wettstein's wounded arm, it tore loose his hold, and soon
+went down again in the eddy, and Klitschka was free.
+
+"Adieu, Herr Oberist; tenez Klitschka pour vous! Adieu!" And that
+happy, honest face sank almost within reach of me. The weight of his
+arms prevented his rising again, and only an angry eddy, glistening in
+the moonlight, marked his turbid grave.
+
+Ruby, snorting, and struggling hard with the current, pulled me safely
+to the shore, and little Klitschka followed as well as her loaded
+saddle would permit. For the moment, with my own life and the lives of
+two tried companions to care for, I thought of nothing else; but as I
+sat drying at Magnus's roaring hearth the direst desolation overwhelmed
+me. Very far from home,--far even from the home-like surroundings of
+my own camp,--I had clung to this devoted fellow as a part of myself.
+He was a proven friend; with him I never lacked the sympathy that, in
+the army at least, is born of constant companionship, and he filled a
+place in my life that dearer friends at home might not find. He was the
+one comrade whose heart, I was sure, was filled only with unquestioning
+love for me. Henceforth I must look for support to companions who saw
+me as I was, who knew my faults and my weaknesses, and whose kind
+regard was tempered with criticism. The one love that was blind, that
+took me for better or for worse, had been, in an instant, torn from my
+life, and I was more sad than I can tell.
+
+But Duty knows no sentiment. A saddened party, we mounted, to join the
+main command; and, as we rode on through the rest of that desolate
+night, no word passed to tell the gloom that each man felt.
+
+The petty distinctions of earthly rank were swallowed up in a feeling
+of true brotherhood, and Wettstein--promoted now--rode at our head as a
+worthy leader, showing the way to a faithful performance of all duty,
+and a kindly and cheerful bearing of all life's burdens; and, through
+the long and trying campaigns that followed, more than one of us was
+the better soldier for the lesson his soldierly life had taught.
+
+
+
+
+CAMPAIGNING WITH MAX.
+
+
+Union City was not a city at all; it was hardly a village, and
+"Disunion" would have been its fairer designation. It lay in the woods
+at the crossing of two railroads, one pointing toward Mobile and one
+toward Memphis, but neither leading anywhere. There was a tradition
+that trains had once been run upon each, but many bridges had had to be
+rebuilt to make the short line to Columbus passable, and the rest was
+ruin; for Forrest had been there with his cavalry.
+
+The land was just so much raised above the broad swamp of Northwestern
+Tennessee that whiskey with men to drink it, and a Methodist Church
+South with people to attend it, were possible. With these meagre
+facilities for life, and the vague inducement of a railroad-crossing.
+Union City had struggled into an amphibious subsistence; but it had
+never thriven, and its corner-lots had but feebly responded to the
+hopes of its projectors.
+
+For many a mile around, the forests and swamps were well-nigh
+impenetrable, and the occasional clearings were but desolate oases
+in the waste of marsh and fallen timber. The roads were wood-trails
+leading nowhere in particular, and all marked a region of the most
+scanty and unfulfilled promise.
+
+General Asboth, seeing (by the map) that it commanded two lines of
+railroad, sent us to occupy this strategic point, and we gradually
+accumulated to the number of twenty-five hundred cavalry and four
+thousand infantry, drawing our regular supplies from Columbus;
+and occupying our time with a happy round of drills, inspections,
+horse-races, cock-fights, and poker. It was not an elevating existence,
+but it was charmingly idle, and we passed the serene and lovely autumn
+of 1863 in a military dreamland, where nothing ever came to disturb
+our quiet, or to mar our repose with the realities of war. We built
+ourselves houses, we shot game for our tables, we made egg-nog for our
+evenings, and we were happy. The charm of camp-life--with just enough
+of occupation and responsibility, and with enough improvement in the
+troops for a reward--made even this wilderness enjoyable. I had the
+advantage of seniority and command, and the physical comforts that
+naturally gravitate toward a commanding officer did not fail me.
+
+My house, built with the mouse-colored logs of a Rebel block-house,
+covered with the roof of the post-office, and floored and ceiled with
+the smoke-mellowed lining of the Methodist church, was broad and low
+and snug. Its windows, also taken from the sanctuary in question, were
+set on their sides, and gave to each of the two rooms wide, low-browed
+outlooks into the woods and over the drill-ground, that would have made
+worse quarters agreeable. The bricks of an abandoned domestic fireside
+built a spacious fireplace across an angle of each of the rooms, and
+the clay of the locality plastered all our chinks "to keep the wind
+away." I have seen more pretentious houses and more costly, but never
+one in which three chosen spirits--I had, in a happy moment, selected
+Voisin and the Hun for my staff--got more that is worth the getting
+out of the simple and virtuous life of a cavalry headquarters. We were
+at peace with all the world (Forrest was in Mississippi), our pay
+was regular, our rations were ample,--and Asboth had been ordered to
+Pensacola.
+
+Old A. J., his successor,--every inch a soldier, and a good fellow
+to the very core,--used sometimes to roll up his camp mattress and
+run down from Columbus for an inspection. Those are marked days in
+our memories. He was a lynx in the field, and wry buttoning roused
+him to articulate wrath; but he unbuckled his sabre at the door, and
+brought only geniality within,--a mellow geniality that warmed to the
+influences of our modest hospitality, and lasted far into the night;
+and then, when the simple and inoffensive game was over, and its scores
+were settled, the dear old boy--usually with a smile of conquest
+wandering through his gray beard--would unroll his bundle before the
+fire and sleep like a baby until reveille. Happy, happy days,--and
+still happier nights!
+
+Naturally, in such a life as we led at Union City, our horses formed
+a very important element in our occupation and in our amusements. Soon
+after our arrival at Columbus,--an event which had taken place a few
+months before,--a spanking mare that I had bought to replace Ruby had
+gone hopelessly lame, and it became again important to all who were
+concerned in my peace of mind, that a satisfactory substitute should be
+found for her. I had still in my stable a little thoroughbred (Guy),
+who, though excellent in all respects, was a trifle under my weight,
+and not at all up to the rough riding that was a necessary part of our
+army life. He could go anywhere, could jump any practicable barrier,
+was fleet and sound, and in all respects admirable, but he was made for
+a lighter weight than mine, and, except for show and parade riding,
+must mainly be used to carry Ike and the saddle-bags, or to mount a
+friend when a friend favored me.
+
+In a second search, in which most of the officers of the regiment
+took a lively interest, there was found, in Frank Moore's Battalion
+of the Second Illinois Cavalry, a tall, gaunt, lean, haggard,
+thoroughbred-looking beast, which had been captured from Merryweather's
+men in Western Tennessee. He was not a handsome horse, nor was he to
+the ordinary eye in any respect promising; but a trial showed that he
+had that peculiar whalebone character, and wiry, nervous action, which
+come only with blood, and without which no horse is really fit for the
+saddle. The chances were very much against him. He did not possess the
+first element of beauty, save in a clean-cut head, a prominent eye,
+a quick ear, a thin neck, sloping shoulders, high withers, and the
+brilliant activity that no abuse had been able to conquer. He was held
+in abeyance until a careful examination of the two thousand horses at
+the post showed that, even as he stood, he had no equal there for my
+purposes. Since he had come into the army he had been in the possession
+of a private soldier, who had done much scouting duty, and he had been
+initiated (successfully) into the scrub-racing which Illinois soldiers
+much affected. The serious amount of one hundred and forty dollars was
+hazarded in the venture, and he was transferred to our stable. That
+increment of value which always follows the purchase of a new horse
+came rapidly in his case, and it needed only a few gallops on the
+breezy bluffs beyond Fort Halleck, to install him as prime favorite
+among the headquarters' mess.
+
+He was deemed worthy of the noble name of Max, and under Ike's careful
+grooming he returned daily toward the blooming condition that only
+Second Illinois abuse had been able to subdue. In an early race with
+the Hun we were ingloriously beaten; but the Hun rode a marvellous
+little blood mare, blooming with hundreds of bushels of oats, and with
+two years of careful handling. Max, though beaten, was not discouraged,
+and seemed to say that with time and good treatment he would be ready
+for a more successful trial.
+
+During his period of tutelage, and while he was kept from all excessive
+exertion, he was inducted into the mysteries of the art, to him quite
+new, of jumping timber. Columbus had been occupied by Rebel and Union
+soldiers since the outbreak of the war, and its fences, far and wide,
+had all disappeared; but nowhere in the world was there a greater
+variety nor a more ample stock of fallen trees, whose huge boles made
+capital leaping-bars; and over these, almost daily, for some months,
+beginning with the smaller ones and going gradually to the largest
+we could find, Max learned to carry a heavy weight with a power and
+precision that even Ruby could not have excelled.
+
+During all this time, ample feed, good shelter, regular exercise, and
+a couple of hours of Ike's hand-rubbing daily, worked an uninterrupted
+improvement in limb and wind and sinews and coat, until, by the time we
+were ordered to Union City, Max had become the pride of the camp. He
+was over sixteen hands high, of a solid dark bay color, glistening like
+polished mahogany, and active and spirited as a horse in training for
+the Derby.
+
+At Union City the headquarters' horses were stabled under a capital
+shed, close at hand, and all that master's eye and servant's labor
+could accomplish for their care and improvement was lavished upon them;
+so that, during our long months' stay, we were among the best-mounted
+men in the Western army. Our pleasure-riding and our work lay through
+swampy wood-roads, over obstructions of every sort, and across the
+occasional grass farms, with their neglected rail-fences. The weather
+was almost uninterruptedly fine, our few visiting neighbors were miles
+away from us, the shooting was good, and the enjoyment we got from
+our vagabond life in camp was well supplemented by the royal rides we
+almost daily took.
+
+Naturally, in a camp full of idle men given largely to sport, the
+elevating entertainment of horse-racing played a prominent part. Both
+Max and Guy were conspicuous by their successes until, long before the
+close of our leisurely career, but only after they had hung my walls
+with spurs and whips and other trophies of their successful competition
+with all comers, both were ruled out by the impossible odds they were
+obliged to give. The actual military service required was only enough
+to convince me that Max was a beast of endless bottom and endurance,
+and that, accidents apart, he would need no help in any work he might
+be called on to perform. For the rest of the war, with much duty of
+untold severity, I habitually rode no other horse for light work or for
+hard, for long rides or for short ones, on the march or on parade; and
+with all my sentiment for his charming predecessors, I had to confess
+that his equal as a campaigner had never come under my leg. He would
+walk like a cart-horse at the head of a marching column, would step
+like a lord in passing in review, would prance down the main street of
+a town as though vain of all applause, would leap any fence or ditch or
+fallen timber to which he might be put, would fly as though shot from
+a gun in passing along the line; and when, whether early or late, he
+was taken to his stable, would eat like a hungry colt and sleep like a
+tired plough-horse. In all weathers and under all circumstances he was
+steady, honest, intelligent, and ready for every duty. I had ridden
+before, at home and in the army, horses ideally good; I have ridden
+since, over the hunting country of Warwickshire and Northamptonshire,
+horses that were counted of the best, but never, before or since, have
+I mounted such a magnificent piece of perfectly trained and perfectly
+capable horse-flesh.
+
+On one occasion, at Union City, word was brought in that a flag of
+truce from Faulkner had arrived at our picket line, and I rode out
+for a parley over a trifling matter of an exchange of prisoners.
+The officer in charge of the flag, with the company escorting him,
+had originally come from our neighborhood and had belonged to
+Merryweather's "band." As Max trotted up to their bivouac, he was
+greeted with cries of recognition, and a lieutenant of the company was
+kind enough to warn me that I had shown them a stronger inducement
+than they had hitherto had to make an attack on our position; for,
+since Frank Moore had captured the horse I rode, they had determined
+to regain him at any risk. Happily, this laudable wish was never
+fulfilled, and Max remained, in spite of the devices they may have laid
+for his recapture.
+
+During the five months of our stay at this post, we made some hard
+scouts in a hard country, and we held a good part of West Tennessee
+under strict surveillance, but the most memorable feature of all our
+scouting was generally the welcome dismounting under the wide eaves of
+our own house; not, I hope, that we had grown effeminate, but a week's
+tramp through the woods of West Tennessee offers little that memory
+can cherish, and prepares one for a sensation on the near approach of
+comfort.
+
+But five months of such life is enough, and I was not sorry when the
+order came that I must go for a soldier again.
+
+Sherman was about to advance eastward from Vicksburg, destroy the
+lines of railroad by which Forrest received supplies from the fertile
+prairie region of Northern Mississippi, and strike the Rebellion in
+the pit of its stomach. A. J. was to take all my infantry down the
+river, and the cavalry was to move to Colliersville, on the line of the
+Memphis and Charleston Railroad, and join a considerable cavalry force
+gathering there under Sooy Smith and Grierson; thence we were to move
+southeasterly through Mississippi, to engage Forrest's forces and to
+meet Sherman's army at the crossing of the Mobile and Ohio Railroad at
+Meridian.
+
+We lay in camp more than a week, ready to move, but awaiting orders.
+The country (a very wet one) was frozen hard and covered with snow.
+Our order to march and the thaw came together, on the 22d of January.
+We were to cross the Obion River (and bottom) at Sharp's Ferry,
+twenty-three miles southwest of our camp. The command consisted of the
+Fourth Missouri (with a battery), Second New Jersey, Seventh Indiana,
+Nineteenth Pennsylvania, and Frank Moore's Battalion of the Second
+Illinois; in all about twenty-five hundred well-mounted men present for
+duty. The roads were deep with mud and slush, and every creek was "out
+of its banks" with the thaw. We reached the ferry only at nightfall of
+the 23d, over roads that had hourly grown deeper and more difficult.
+Two regiments had crossed, through floating ice (eight horses at a
+trip), by a rope-ferry, and at nine o'clock in the evening, under a
+full moon and a summer temperature, I crossed with staff and escort.
+The river was already so swollen that we landed in two feet of water,
+and still it was rising.
+
+Our camp was fixed five miles away on the upland. The first mile was
+only wet and nasty, and the trail not hard to follow. Then we came to
+the "back slough," thirty feet wide, four feet deep, and still covered
+with four inches of ice. Those who had gone before had broken a track
+through this, and swept the fragments of ice forward until near the
+shore they were packed in for a width of ten feet or more, and to the
+full depth of the water. I can make no stronger statement than that we
+all got through safely, only wet to the skin. How it was done I do not
+pretend to know. Some went in one way and some in another. All I can
+assert is that my stalwart old Max, when he found himself standing,
+belly deep, in broken ice, settled quietly on his haunches and took my
+two hundred pounds with one spring on to dry land four feet higher than
+his starting-point, and twelve feet away,--but then, Max always was
+a marvel. Guy, who carried Ike, scrambled over the top of the broken
+ice as only he or a cat could do. The others fared variously. All were
+drenched, and some were hurt, but all got to the shore at last. Then
+came the hour-long tug to get my ambulance through with its store of
+tent-hold goods and we started for our remaining four miles. The trail,
+even of cavalry, is not easily followed by moonlight when covered
+with half a foot of water, and we lost our way; reaching camp, after
+fourteen miles of hard travel, at four o'clock in the morning.
+
+The river was still rising rapidly, and word was brought that Karge,
+with more than half the brigade, would have to make a detour of fifty
+miles and cross the Three Forks of the Obion far to the eastward,
+joining us some days later, near Jackson. So we idled on, marching a
+few miles each day, camping early, cooking the fat of the land for our
+evening meal, cultivating the questionable friendship of the Rebel
+population by forced contributions of subsistence, and leading, on the
+whole, a peaceful, unlaborious, and charming picnic life. Finally,
+taking Karge again under our wing, we pushed on, resolutely and
+rapidly, over flooded swamps, across deep, rapid rivers, and through
+hostile towns, to our rendezvous; whence, under the command of two
+generals, and as part of an army of eight thousand well-mounted cavalry
+and light artillery, and all in light marching order, we started for
+our more serious work.
+
+The chief in command was a young and handsome, but slightly nervous
+individual, who eschewed the vanities of uniform, and had about himself
+and his horse no evidence of his military character that could not be
+unbuckled and dropped with his sword-belt in case of impending capture.
+He was vacillating in his orders, and a little anxious in his demeanor,
+but he had shown himself cool and clear-headed under fire, and seemed
+resolutely bent on the destruction of the last vestige of Forrest's
+troublesome army. It would be tedious to tell all the adventures of
+our forward expedition; how we marched in three columns over different
+roads, each for himself, and with only a vague notion where and how
+we should meet, and how we should support each other. As it afterward
+proved, the details of the order of march had been given to the
+commanders of the other brigades, while I had been forgotten; so that
+the whole advance was vexed with cross-purposes and with the evidences
+of a hidden misunderstanding. The _contretemps_ that thus came about
+were annoying, and, in one instance, came near being serious: as we
+were going into camp at Prairie Station, my advance reported having
+come in sight of the camp-fires of the enemy; a skirmish-line was sent
+forward, and only on the eve of engaging did they discover that we were
+approaching Hepburn's Brigade, of our column, which had reached the
+same point by another road.
+
+The first days of our march in Mississippi were through Tippah County,
+as rough, hopeless, God-forsaken a country as was ever seen outside
+of Southern Missouri. Its hills were steep, its mud was deep, its
+houses and farms were poor, its facilities for the subsistence of a
+protecting army like ours were of the most meagre description, and
+its streams delayed us long with their torrents of bottomless muddy
+water, fast swelling from the thaw that had unlocked the snow of all
+the deep-buried hills and morasses of their upper waters. We built
+ferry-boats and swamped them, built bridges and broke them, and slowly
+and painfully, horse by horse, transferred the command across the nasty
+riverbeds. Tippah Creek detained us and kept us hard at work all day
+and all night, and we reached the Tallahatchee at New Albany barely in
+time to ford our last man across before it rose to an impassable depth.
+And then for two days we pressed forward, in company with the whole
+column, through the rough, rocky, and wooded country, reaching Okolona
+only at nightfall.
+
+Here we struck the marvellous prairie region of Northeastern
+Mississippi, literally a land flowing with milk and honey. An
+interminable, fertile, rolling prairie lay before us in every
+direction. The stern rule of the Confederacy had compelled the planters
+to offset every small field of cotton with a wide area of corn, until
+the region had become known as the granary of the Southern army.
+Not only must every land-owner devote his broadest fields to the
+cultivation of the much-needed cereal, but one tenth of all his crop
+must be stacked for public use in cribs at the side of the railroad.
+
+It was an important incident of our mission to destroy everything
+which directly or indirectly could afford subsistence to the Rebel
+forces; and during the two days following our arrival at Okolona, while
+we marched as far south as West Point, the sky was red with the flames
+of burning corn and cotton. On a single plantation, our flanking party
+burned thirty-seven hundred bushels of tithe corn, which was cribbed
+near the railroad; no sooner was its light seen at the plantation
+houses than hundreds of negroes, who swarmed from their quarters to
+join our column, fired the rail-built cribs in which the remaining
+nine-tenths of the crop was stored. Driven wild with the infection,
+they set the torch to mansion house, stables, cotton-gin, and quarters,
+until the whole village-like settlement was blazing in an unchecked
+conflagration. To see such wealth, and the accumulated products of such
+vast labor, swept from the face of the earth, gave to the aspect of war
+a saddening reality, which was in strong contrast to the peaceful and
+harmless life our brigade had thus far led. In all this prairie region
+there is no waste land, and the evidences of wealth and fertility
+lay before us in all directions. As we marched, the negroes came _en
+masse_ from every plantation to join our column, leaving only fire and
+absolute destruction behind them. It was estimated that during these
+two days' march two thousand slaves and one thousand mules were added
+to our train.
+
+The incidents of all this desolation were often sickening and
+heart-rending; delicate women and children, whom the morning had found
+in peace and plenty, and glowing with pride in the valor of Southern
+arms and the certainty of an early independence for their beloved
+half-country, found themselves, before nightfall, homeless, penniless,
+and alone, in the midst of a desolate land.
+
+Captain Frank Moore, the Cossack of our brigade, went at night to
+an outlying plantation, of which the showy mansion-house stood on a
+gentle acclivity in the edge of a fine grove. Here lived alone with an
+only daughter, a beautiful girl, a man who had been conspicuous in his
+aid to the Rebellion, and whose arrest had been ordered. The squadron
+drew up in front of the house and summoned its owner to come forth. He
+came, armed, sullen, stolid, and determined, but obviously unnerved by
+the force confronting him. Behind him followed his daughter, dressed
+in white, and with her long light hair falling over her shoulders. The
+sight of the hated "Yanks" crazed her with rage, and before her father
+could reply to the question with which he had been accosted, she called
+to him wildly, "Don't speak to the villains! Shoot! shoot them down,
+shoot them down!" wringing her hands, and screaming with rage. The
+excitement was too much for his judgment, and he fired wildly on the
+troops. He was riddled through and through with bullets; and as Moore
+turned away, he left that fine house blazing in the black night, and
+lighting up the figure of the crazy girl as she wandered, desolate and
+beautiful, to and fro before her burning home, unheeded by the negroes
+who ran with their hastily made bundles to join the band of their
+deliverers. Moore's description of this scene in the simple language
+that it was his unpretending way to use, gave the most vivid picture we
+had seen of the unmitigated horror and badness of war.
+
+As an instrument of destruction in the enemy's country, our raid had
+thus far been more successful than we could have anticipated; but we
+had come for even more serious business than this, and there were
+already indications that its main purpose would be a failure. Our
+commander had evidently no stomach for a close approach to the enemy,
+and his injunctions at Colliersville that we were to try always to
+"Fight at close quarters!" "Go at them as soon as possible with the
+sabre!" and other valorous ejaculations, were in singular contrast to
+the impressions he evinced as the prospect of an actual engagement drew
+near.
+
+Forrest was in our front with about our own number of cavalry, but
+without artillery, of which we had twenty good pieces. The open country
+offered good fighting ground, and gave to our better drilled and more
+completely organized forces a decided advantage, even without our
+great odds in artillery. There lay before us a fair opportunity for
+dispersing the most successful body of cavalry in the Rebel service;
+and, could we effect a junction with Sherman, we should enable him
+to divide the Confederacy from Vicksburg to Atlanta. One of the most
+brilliant and damaging campaigns of the war seemed ready to open. Its
+key lay in our successful engagement, on a fair field, with an inferior
+force. Yet all of us who were in a position to know the spirit with
+which we were commanded were conscious of a gradual oozing out at the
+finger-ends of the determination to make a successful fight; and it
+was a sad night for us all when, at West Point, with our skirmish-line
+steadily engaging the Rebel outposts, an order came that we were to
+fall back before daybreak toward Okolona.
+
+The brigade commanders and their staffs had had severe duty in the
+scattered work of destruction, and even Max, tough though he was, had
+been almost overworked with constant galloping to and fro, and with the
+frequent countermarching our varying orders had required. Still he was
+better than his comrades, and many a man was anxious for his mount,
+should our retreat be pressed.
+
+Early in the morning we were on our way toward the rear,--about
+eight thousand cavalry, ten sections of artillery, two thousand
+pack-mules, and an unnumbered cloud of fugitive slaves mounted on
+their masters' mules, often two or three on each, and clustering
+under our shadow as their only means of escape to the happy land of
+freedom. In an organized advance, all of this vast hanging on could be
+kept at the rear and in good order; but on a retreat the instinct of
+self-preservation always attacks first the non-combatant element, and
+during all the days that followed, we found our way constantly blocked
+with these throngs of panic-stricken people.
+
+No sooner had we turned tail than Forrest saw his time had come, and
+he pressed us sorely all day and until nightfall, and tried hard to
+gain our flanks. A hundred times we might have turned and given him
+successful battle, but, at every suggestion of this, we received from
+our general, who was well in advance of the retiring column, the order
+to push forward and give our rear a free road for retreat. Midnight
+found us again in the vicinity of Okolona, and the next daybreak showed
+the enemy's long column filing out of the woods and stretching well on
+toward our right flank.
+
+Even the plains of Texas could offer no field better suited for a
+cavalry engagement, and it was with satisfaction that we received, at
+five o'clock in the morning, an order to prepare at once for a fight;
+but our men were barely mounted and in line when an order came to turn
+our backs upon this open field, and to retreat with all expedition
+toward Memphis.
+
+When we left Okolona we left hope behind, for our road struck at once
+into a wooded, hilly country, full of by-ways and cross-roads known to
+the enemy and unknown to us, and we well knew that this movement would
+double Forrest's power and divide our own. Then, for a long day, tired
+and hungry from the hard work and constant movement we had just gone
+through, and with our horses half-fed and overworked, we pushed on, our
+rear often attacked and sometimes broken, our mule-train and negroes
+thrown into frequent confusion, one of our brigades demoralized and put
+to flight, and the enemy still pressing our rear and reaching for our
+flanks. At last, towards night, it became evident that a stand must be
+made or all would be entirely lost, and at Ivy Farm, near Pontotoc, we
+found a broad, open hill-top, with large fields, high fences, and stout
+log-houses, which offered an opportunity. By this time the command
+was too widely separated, and some of it too much disorganized, for
+the concentration of even a whole brigade, but a part of Hepburn's
+and a part of my own were disentangled from the corral of fugitives
+and brought into line. Both of our generals were upon the field, and
+to our surprise both seemed brave and resolute; and this not with the
+resolution of despair, for the actual immediate necessity of fighting
+often steadies nerves which are easily shaken by the anticipation
+of danger. Brave they were, but not always of the same mind, and
+conflicting orders continued to add to our embarrassment and insecurity.
+
+It is not worth while to detail all the incidents of the opening of
+the short engagement; it was ended by the only legitimate cavalry
+charge made by the "Vierte Missouri" during the whole of its four
+years' history.
+
+We had withdrawn from the line where we had been fighting on foot, had
+mounted, formed, and drawn sabre; the road about one hundred yards in
+front of us was swarming with Rebels, who crept along the fence-lines
+and in the edge of the bordering woods, and kept up a steady rain of
+fire well over our heads, where we heard that _pfwit_--_pfwit_--_pfwit_
+of flying bullets which, happily, has no relative in the whole chorus
+of sounds, and which is heard above all the din of battle, and is felt
+through every remotest nerve.
+
+At the command "Forward," excitement ran down the line, and there was
+a disposition for an immediate rush. But "Steady--right dress--trot!"
+in a measured tone, taken up in turn by the company officers, brought
+back all the effect of our three years' discipline of the drill-ground.
+Later, "Steady--gallop--right dress!" accelerated the speed without
+disturbing the alignment, and then, at last, "Charge!" and with a
+universal yelling and brandishing of sabres we went forward like the
+wind. I then felt how mad a venture we had undertaken, for before us
+was the enemy, it is true, but the enemy behind a high and stout,
+staked and ridered rail-fence. As we drew very near this, still under
+heavy fire, which now at the short range was telling, the command
+became conscious that the six-foot fence would withstand our shock,
+and it wavered. I turned to my bugler to sound the recall, when I saw
+him out of the corner of my eye, his white horse rearing literally
+to his full height and falling backward with a crash that must have
+killed the poor boy at once. The recall was not needed: the regiment
+had turned and was running. The officers, being the best mounted
+and generally the lightest weights, soon reached the front, and
+"Steady--right dress--trot! Steady--right dress--trot!" was repeated
+along the line, until the drill-ground precision was regained, and then
+"By fours--right about--wheel!" and we stood facing the enemy again,
+ready for another advance. Max had been struck by a grazing bullet and
+had been plunging heavily, but the wound was not serious and he was
+soon quieted. We now saw that our charge, futile though it seemed,
+had done its work. The advance of the enemy was checked; the sight of
+troops that could retire and re-form for a new attack seemed to have a
+stunning effect upon them. Practically the engagement was ended.
+
+Subsequently, one of Forrest's staff officers told the Hun that the
+size of the division which had charged was variously estimated at from
+five to ten thousand, but that he had been accustomed to such things
+and knew that we were not more than two thousand. In fact, we were less
+than six hundred. Forrest's report of the battle of Pontotoc states
+that the engagement was ended "by a cavalry charge of the enemy, which
+was repulsed."
+
+There was still some sharp scrimmaging, and we had to make two or
+three more squadron and company charges to drive away small attacks
+upon our retreating guns; but the battle, as a battle, was over, and
+Forrest's whole advance had been stopped and ended by six hundred
+Fourth Missouri Dutchmen, galloping, yelling, and swinging their
+sabres at several thousand men well secured behind a rail-fence. I had
+before, in drill-ground charges, seen old soldiers and experienced
+officers jump down and run away from a fence on which they were sitting
+to watch the advance of charging cavalry which they knew must wheel
+before coming within five rods of them; but I had never supposed that
+hot-blooded soldiers, in the full excitement of a successful attack,
+could be unnerved and turned by the roar and thundering oncoming of a
+regiment that could by no possibility reach them. Our first setting out
+had driven back a thin skirmish-line which had to cross the fence under
+high speed; this, doubtless, aided in the _debacle_; the charge had
+stunned them, but it was the rally that stopped the pursuit.
+
+The rest of our march was without interesting incident all the way to
+Memphis, but it was almost incessant, day and night; without incident,
+that is, that it is worth while to tell here, but our days and nights
+upon the road were filled with annoyance and disgust, and with a store
+of unhappy and ludicrous memories that will last the lifetime of all
+who knew them.
+
+One day, at New Albany, Max and I were feeding and sleeping in
+the door of an old mill while the command was slowly crossing the
+antiquated bridge over the Tallahatchie, when I was awakened by
+Grierson's riding up in great alarm, calling upon me "for God's sake"
+to use the ford as well as the bridge, for Hepburn was being cut to
+pieces in the rear, and I must give him the full road for his retreat.
+I had always been a respectful subordinate, but none of us were then
+in the best temper; I did not believe a word of it, and I frankly
+told him so. Even old Max pricked up his ears and snorted as if in
+derision. Almost as we were talking, there came an aid from Hepburn
+saying that he had found a good supply of forage and would be glad to
+go into camp for the night. But there was no camp to be thought of for
+that tired crew; the bogey of incessant pursuit loomed up portentously
+close upon our rear-guard, and sent its shadow deep into the bowels
+of our commander, who was miles away in the advance, and who would
+allow us only the fewest possible hours in the very dead of night for
+hasty cooking and scant repose. We were a worn and weary lot as we
+finally went into camp at the rear of the town; worn and weary, sadly
+demoralized, and almost dismounted. I had lost fifteen hundred good
+horses, and my men, who had been eager and ready for a successful
+campaign, were broken in spirit and sadly weakened in discipline.
+
+All who had been compelled to bear the brunt of the hard work now
+needed for themselves and their horses absolute rest for days; but
+being called into the city the morning after our arrival, my eyes were
+greeted with the spectacle of General Sooy Smith, no longer ill, and
+with no trace of shame or annoyance on his face. He had shed his modest
+and prudent attire, and shone out with all the brass radiance of a
+full-fledged major-general. From this time until the Fourth Missouri
+cavalry was mustered out of service, our headquarters were in the
+immediate neighborhood of Memphis, and our life was much more active
+than it had been at Union City.
+
+Not very much is to be said for Max during this time, except in
+connection with the Sturgis expedition, beyond the fact that we lay
+long in the immediate vicinity of the race-course, which we repaired
+and used faithfully, and, so far as he was concerned, with eminent
+success. The more frequent necessity for duty, the great labor of
+remounting, reorganizing, and redrilling the command, united with
+the greater publicity of our position to lay some restraint on our
+mode of life, and to make our conduct more circumspect. Still we
+were not miserable, and the neighborhood of a large town has, to a
+well-regulated headquarters' mess, its compensations as well as its
+drawbacks.
+
+Sturgis's expedition to Guntown and back--especially back--has passed
+into history, and its unwritten memories will always remain with those
+who took part in it.
+
+Guntown is far away in Northeastern Mississippi. It is not laid down on
+the map of the country, but it lies just across the Tishamingo Creek,
+and it consists mainly of two plantation houses and a school-house.
+Our stay there was not long, and we were too much occupied to study
+the locality minutely, but it is my impression that the most important
+incident in its history was connected with our visit.
+
+We were a force of about nine thousand infantry, cavalry, and
+artillery,--some black and some white, some good and some bad,--sent
+out by Sherman as a tub to the Forrest whale; a diversion to keep this
+commander from joining Hood in Northern Georgia; though I doubt if
+even General Sherman in his moments of wildest enthusiasm anticipated
+just the issue that followed. Our march out was not rapid, and it was
+well ordered. We were allowed to take our train, and old John Ellard's
+four stupendous mules drew our headquarters' wagon, well laden with
+the comforts we had accumulated during a long service, including a
+brand-new, well-furnished, and abundantly stored camp-chest that had
+just arrived from St. Louis. So far as the comforts of a home for five
+youngsters can be stored in one mule-wagon, we were well supplied for
+a campaign of any length; and judging from the mess-tables to which we
+were invited, others of the command were no less well provided. In due
+time we reached the town of Ripley, a rather pretty New-England-looking
+village, but, like all Southern towns at that time, entirely devoid of
+men and overflowing with women of the most venomous and spiteful sort,
+who did all in their power to add to the interest of the Sunday evening
+we passed in their company.
+
+We had some light skirmishing on our arrival, but whoever it was that
+attacked us withdrew and left us in undisturbed possession of the
+comfortable rooms and fireplaces of the town. Our next day's march
+brought us to a large open plantation on a commanding hill, whence our
+evening scouting-parties soon found the enemy posted in some force and
+apparently disposed for an engagement.
+
+It seemed always Forrest's plan to select his own fighting-ground, and
+the plan of our commanders to gratify him. Sturgis committed the usual
+folly of trying to hold every inch he had gained, and of forming his
+line of battle on the head of the column and under fire.
+
+We breakfasted at three in the morning, and marched at half past
+four. My command had the advance. The enemy allowed himself to be
+easily driven until half past eight, when he made some show of
+resistance. At this time the last of our regiments could hardly have
+left the camping-ground, and probably a judicious retreat would have
+drawn Forrest's whole force back to the open country we had left.
+But "retreat" was not yet written on our banners (of that day), and
+orders came from our general to support the advance-guard, form line
+of battle, and hold our position. So far as the cavalry brigade was
+concerned this was easily done, and we got into good line near the
+edge of a wood without difficulty. Here, for four mortal hours, or
+until half past twelve, we carried on a tolerably equal warfare, both
+sides blazing away at each other with little effect across the six
+hundred yards of cleared valley that lay between two skirts of wood.
+So far as the endurance of our troops was concerned, this engagement
+could have been kept up until nightfall, though our ranks were slowly
+thinning. Several desperate charges were made on our position, and were
+repulsed with considerable loss to both sides. Pending the arrival
+of the infantry it would have been folly for us to attempt a further
+advance, but had we been properly supported, or, better, had we at once
+fallen back upon our support, we might have given, as the _post bellum_
+reports of Forrest's officers show, a better ending to the day's work.
+It was only at half past twelve, when our ammunition was reduced to
+five rounds per man, and when our battery had fired its last shot, that
+the infantry began to arrive, and then they came a regiment at a time,
+or only so fast as the Forrest mill could grind them up in detail.
+
+They had taken our place, and we had withdrawn to their rear, where
+we were joined by one after another of the defeated or exhausted
+infantry regiments. Little by little the enemy pressed upon us,
+gaining rod after rod of our position, until finally our last arriving
+troops, a splendid colored regiment, reached the field of battle at
+double-quick, breathless and beaten by their own speed, barely in time
+to check the assault until we could cross the creek and move toward
+the rear. The retreat was but fairly begun when we came upon our train
+of two hundred wagons piled pell-mell in a small field and blocked in
+beyond the possibility of removal. With sad eyes we saw John Ellard
+cut his traces and leave all that was dear to us--tents, camp-chest,
+poker-table, and all that we cherished--to inevitable capture. The
+train was _our_ tub to the whale; and while Forrest's men were sacking
+our treasures, and refilling the caissons of all our batteries, which
+they had captured, we had time to form for the retreat, more or less
+orderly according as we had come early or late off the field. The
+demoralizing roar of our own guns, and the howling over our heads of
+our own shells, together with the sharp rattle of musketry in our rear,
+hastened and saddened the ignominious flight of the head of our column,
+though, for some reason, the enemy's advance upon us was slow.
+
+All that long night we marched on, without food and without rest. At
+early dawn we reached Ripley, where we paused for breath. Max had been
+ridden almost uninterruptedly for twenty-four hours, and for four hours
+had done the constant hard work that the supervision of a long line in
+active engagement had made necessary; and he was glad to be unsaddled
+and turned for fifteen minutes into a scantily grown paddock, where he
+rolled and nibbled and refreshed himself as much as ordinary horses do
+with a whole night's rest. The ambulances with our groaning wounded
+men came pouring into the village, and to our surprise, those women,
+who had so recently given only evidence of a horrified hatred, pressed
+round to offer every aid that lay in their power, and to comfort our
+suffering men as only kind-hearted women can.
+
+With the increasing daylight the pursuit was reopened with vigor, and
+on we went, and ever on, marching all that day, our rear-guard being
+constantly engaged, and hundreds of our men being captured, thousands
+more scattering into the woods. My lieutenant-colonel, Von Helmrich,
+who had been for twenty-eight years a cavalry officer in Germany, and
+who, after thirteen months in Libby Prison, had overtaken us as we were
+leaving Memphis, was recaptured and carried back to Richmond,--to die
+of a good dinner on his second release, ten months later. At nightfall,
+the pursuit growing weak, we halted to collect together our stragglers,
+but not to rest, and after a short half-hour pushed on again; and all
+that interminable night, and until half past ten the next morning,
+when we reached Colliersville and the railroad, reinforcements, and
+supplies, we marched, marched, marched, without rest, without sleep,
+and without food. The cavalrymen were mainly dismounted and driving
+their tired jades before them, only Max and a few others carrying their
+riders to the very end, and coming in with a whinny of content to the
+familiar stables and back-yards of the little town.
+
+Most other officers whose service had been as constant as mine had had
+extra horses to ride for relief; but I had never yet found march too
+long for Max's wiry sinews, and trusted to him alone. He had now been
+ridden almost absolutely without intermission, and much of the time
+at a gallop or a rapid trot, for fifty-four hours. I had had for my
+own support the excitement and then the anxious despair of responsible
+service, and Ike had filled his haversack with hard-bread from John
+Ellard's abandoned wagon; an occasional nibble at this, and unlimited
+pipes of tobacco, had fortified me in my endurance of the work; but Max
+had had in the whole time not the half of what he would have made light
+of for a single meal. I have known and have written about brilliant
+feats of other horses, but as I look over the whole range of all the
+best animals I have seen, I bow with respect to the wonderful courage,
+endurance, and fidelity of this superbly useful brute.
+
+There is an elasticity in youth and health, trained and hardened by
+years of active field-service, which asserts itself under the most
+depressing circumstances. Even this shameful and horrible defeat and
+flight had their ludicrous incidents, which we were permitted to
+appreciate. Thus, for instance, during a lull in the engagement at
+Guntown, I had seated myself in a rush-bottomed chair under the lee of
+a broad tree-trunk; a prudent pig, suspecting danger, had taken shelter
+between the legs of the chair, leaving, however, his rear unprotected.
+Random bullets have an odd way of finding weak places, and it was due
+to one of these that I was unseated, with an accompaniment of squeal,
+by the rapid and articulate flight of my companion.
+
+During our last night's march, my brigade having the advance, and I
+being at its rear, Grierson ordered me to prevent the pushing ahead
+of the stragglers of the other brigades, who were to be recognized,
+he reminded me, by their wearing hats (mine wore caps). The order
+was peremptory, and was to be enforced even at the cost of cutting
+the offenders down. Grierson's adjutant was at my side; we were all
+sleeping more or less of the time, but constantly some hatted straggler
+was detected pushing toward the front, and ordered back,--the adjutant
+being especially sharp-eyed in detecting the mutilated sugar-loaves
+through the gloom. Finally, close to my right and pushing slowly to
+the front, in a long-strided walk, came a gray horse with a hatted
+rider,--an india-rubber poncho covering his uniform. I ordered
+him back; the adjutant, eager for the enforcement of the order,
+remonstrated at the man's disobedience; I ordered again, but without
+result; the adjutant ejaculated, "Damn him, cut him down!" I drew my
+sabre and laid its flat in one long, stinging welt across that black
+poncho: "----! who are you hitting?" Then we both remembered that
+Grierson too wore a hat; and I tender him here my public acknowledgment
+of a good-nature so great that an evening reunion in Memphis over a
+dozen of wine won his generous silence.
+
+One might go on with interminable gossip over incidents of camp and
+field for which at this late day only scant interest is felt; but
+nothing that I could say more would probably aid my purpose, which has
+been simply by a trifling sketch to recall the jollity, the comfort,
+the suffering, and the misery of campaign life, and to show how in the
+field more than anywhere else one learns to cherish and to depend upon
+a faithful and honest and willing comrade like my royal old Max.
+
+
+
+
+HOW I GOT MY OVERCOAT.
+
+(CIRCUMSTANTIALLY TRUE.)
+
+
+The war was not quite over, but my regiment was old enough to have
+grown too small for a colonel, and I sat, the dismalest of all men,
+a "mustered-out" officer, sated with such good things as a suddenly
+arrested income had allowed me, over an after-dinner table in a little
+room at the Athenaeum Club. My coffee was gone to its dregs; the closing
+day was shutting down gloomily in such a weary rain as only a New York
+back-yard ever knows; and I was wondering what was to become of a man
+whom four years of cavalry service had estranged from every good and
+useful thing in life. The only career that then seemed worth running
+was run out for me; and, worst of all, my pay had been finally stopped.
+
+The world was before me for a choice, but I had no choice. The only
+thing I could do was to command mounted troops, and commanders of
+mounted troops were not in demand. Ages ago I had known how to do other
+things, but the knowledge had gone from me, and was not to be recalled
+so long as I had enough money left with which to be unhappy in idle
+foreboding. I had not laid down my life in the war, but during its
+wonderful four years I had laid down, so completely, the ways of life
+of a sober and industrious citizen, and had soaked my whole nature so
+full of the subtile ether of idleness and vagabondism, that it seemed
+as easy and as natural to become the Aladdin I might have dreamed
+myself to be as the delver I had really been. With a heavy heart, then,
+and a full stomach, I sat in a half-disconsolate, half-reminiscent,
+not wholly unhappy mood, relapsing with post-prandial ease into that
+befogged intellectual condition in which even the drizzle against the
+window-panes can confuse itself with the patter on a tent roof; and
+the charm of the old wanderings came over me again, filling my table
+with the old comrades, even elevating my cigar to a brier-wood, and
+recalling such fellowship as only tent-life ever knows.
+
+Such dreaming is always interrupted, else it would never end; mine was
+disturbed by a small card on a small salver, held meekly across the
+table by the meekest of waiters.
+
+The card bore the name "Adolf zu Dohna-Schlodien," and a count's
+coronet,--a count's coronet and "zu" (a touch above "von")! I
+remembered to have seen a letter from my adjutant to the Prussian
+Consul in Philadelphia, asking him to obtain information about a
+handsome young musical "Graf zu" something, who was creating a
+sensation in St. Louis society, and the "zu" seemed to indicate this as
+the party in question; he had spoken of him as having defective front
+teeth, which seemed to be pointing to the "color and distinguishing
+marks," known in Herd Book pedigrees, and human passports,--a means of
+identification I resolved to make use of; for my experience with the
+German nobility in America had been rather wide than remunerative.
+
+The "Herr zu" had waited in the hall, and was standing under the full
+light of the lamp. He was very tall, very slight, and very young,
+apparently not more than twenty, modestly dressed, and quiet in his
+manner. He was not strikingly handsome, though very well looking. His
+hands were the most perfect I ever saw, and the ungloved one showed
+careful attention. There was no defect noticeable in his front teeth.
+He bowed slightly and handed me a letter. It was from Voisin, my former
+adjutant, but it was not exactly a letter of introduction. At least,
+it was less cordial than Voisin's letters of introduction were wont to
+be. Yet it was kind. Without commending the Count as a bosom friend, he
+still said he was much interested in him, had reason to believe in him,
+was sorry for him, had given him material aid, and was very desirous
+that he should pull through some pecuniary troubles, which he could do
+only by enlisting in the Regular Army, and receiving his bounty. From
+this he would give me money to release his baggage, which was valuable,
+from some inconveniences that were then attending it in St. Louis.
+Would I get him enlisted? He said he would enlist, and would prefer to
+be known under the name Adolph Danforth. The gentleman himself took
+early occasion to express this preference.
+
+I debated a little what to do. He was not introduced as a friend, only
+as a person in need of help; yet Voisin believed in him, and he had
+asked a service that he would not have asked for an unworthy man. I
+engaged him in conversation and got him to smile. It was a very frank
+smile, but it displayed a singular defect far up on the front teeth.
+This decided me. He was the same Graf zu whose position had been asked
+of the Prussian Consul, and I knew he had learned that the Graf zu
+Dohna-Schlodien, an officer in the Gardecorps Kuerassier, was of the
+highest nobility and of a family of great wealth. There was evidently
+no technical reason why the poor fellow should not be received
+cordially and well treated. So we went back to the smoking-room, and
+with fresh coffee and cigars opened an acquaintance which resulted not
+altogether uneventfully.
+
+He was not obtrusive. His story was not forced upon me; but as I
+already had its thread, I was able to draw it from him in a natural
+way, and he told it very frankly, though halting a little at its more
+important turnings, as if wondering how its development would strike
+me. There was just enough of hesitancy over a harrowing tale to throw
+on myself the responsibility of learning it.
+
+He had been brought up by the tenderest of mothers at the castle of
+Schlodien (I think in Silesia), had early joined the Cuirassiers of the
+Body Guard, had fought a fatal duel in which he had been the aggressor,
+and had been condemned to the Fortress of Spandau. Only his mother's
+great influence (exercised without the knowledge of his stern and much
+older father, who was then on his distant estates) had secured for him
+an opportunity to escape. He had come directly to America, and had
+remained near Boston until he received intimation (again the result
+of his mother's influence with Baron Gerolt, the Prussian Minister at
+Washington) that his return under the Extradition Treaty was being
+urged at the solicitation of the family of his fallen antagonist. He
+had then taken refuge in a remote town in South Missouri, where he
+amused himself with shooting. His mother had written to him but once,
+and had not been able to send him money. He had at last returned to
+St. Louis, where he had contracted some small debts which Voisin and
+another kind friend had assumed. To reimburse them and to gain more
+perfect seclusion, he had resolved to enlist in the Regular Army. It
+was a sad conclusion of his career, but as an honorable man (and a
+pursued one) he had no choice but to accept it.
+
+It was the old story,--_noblesse oblige_. There was but one way out
+of a sad affair, and--like a very Graf zu--this stripling, who had been
+born and bred to a better fate, faced the penalty of his misfortune
+without flinching. I tried infinite suggestions, but nothing else
+offered the immediate money which alone could relieve him of debt and
+restore him his wardrobe and the portraits of his mother and sister,
+which with a few well-worn letters, were all he had to cheer him in his
+exile. We sat till far into the night and until my kindest sympathies
+were fully aroused by the utter and almost childlike simplicity and
+frankness with which the poor boy told of his sorrows. I had been
+taught by a very ample experience to look with much caution on German
+counts and barons,--an experience that, if it was worth what it had
+cost, I could not prize too highly; but here was an entirely new type,
+a combination of the gentlest breeding with an unsophistication that
+argued more of a mother's care than of garrison influences, and an
+utter absence of the devil-may-care manner that army life in Germany
+had hitherto seemed to give. With the improvidence of one who had
+never known the lack of money, he had lodged himself at the Everett
+House; and as I left him at its door, I resolved to lose no time in
+getting him enlisted and stopping an expense that would only add to
+his troubles. The next day I saw the official who had charge of the
+making up of the city's quota, and easily arranged for the examination
+of my candidate. Dohna begged me to secure his admission to a command
+whose officers would be able to appreciate his difficult position, and
+a weary time I had of it. At last it was all arranged; he had passed,
+with much shock to his sensibilities, the surgeon's examination, and
+had been enrolled in a company of Regular Infantry, whose captain
+(then serving on the general staff of the department) had acquired a
+sympathy for him not less than my own. His bounty (over seven hundred
+dollars) he put into my hands, and he went with me to Adams's Express
+office, where we sent more than half the sum to St. Louis,--the full
+amount of his indebtedness. One specified trunk was to be sent to the
+Everett House, and the rest of his luggage--which Voisin had described
+as valuable--to me. I received by an early mail the receipt of the St.
+Louis express-office for it, and found it most convenient to let it lie
+for the present, addressed to me personally, at the office in New York.
+It would be useless to Dohna in the army, and I was to take care of it
+for him.
+
+The captain of the company in which he was enlisted secured him a
+furlough for ten days, and, to show his gratitude, he invited us both
+to dine with him at the Everett. We sat down at seven, and we sat long.
+The best that either cellar or kitchen afforded was spread before us in
+wasteful profusion, and our host, temperate in his sipping, but eating
+with the appetite of youth, seemed only to regret the limit of our
+capacity. As we walked across the square, filled and with the kindest
+emotions, we planned means for so occupying the remaining days of the
+furlough as to allow but little opportunity for money-spending. His
+company was at Fort Trumbull, and after he joined he would be safe.
+
+The next day being Saturday, I took him to my father's house in the
+country, where his unfortunate story was already known, and where as
+much real interest was felt in him as the good people of Connecticut
+ever accord to a duellist. He had a friend living farther out on the
+New Haven road, and he took an early train to see her (this was a new
+feature), returning to me in the evening. I met him at the depot. He
+wore the superb uniform overcoat of the Gardecorps Kuerassier, long,
+flowing, and rich, with a broad, scarlet-lined fur collar. It was
+caught across the throat with a scarlet snood, and hung loosely from
+the shoulders. It made his six feet two really becoming. At home he
+was easy but very quiet, saying little but saying it very well, and
+he won as much confidence as the stain on his moral character would
+allow. Like most of his class, he knew and cared absolutely nothing
+for what interests the New England mind, and he would early have
+palled on our taste but for his music. His performance was skilful; he
+played difficult music, and he played it very well, but without vanity
+or apparent consciousness. When not occupied in this way, and when
+not addressed, he neither spoke nor read, apparently he did not even
+think, but relapsed into a sad and somewhat vacant reticence. But for
+our knowledge of his misfortunes, he would have been uninteresting.
+On Sunday he gave me a new confidence. His friend up the road was
+an Everett House acquaintance, made when he first came from Boston.
+She was an angel! She knew his sad story, and she had given him her
+Puritan heart. In the trying days to come I was to be the link that
+should bind them in their correspondence. She must not know of his
+degraded position, and all letters were to pass under cover to me. Even
+_noblesse_ did not hide the tears that this prospect of long separation
+wrung from him, and he poured out his grief with most touching
+unrestraint. This was the one sorrow of his life that even his trained
+equanimity could not conquer. It made me still more respect his simple,
+honest nature and his unfeigned grief. I was doubly sorry that this
+last trial of separated love should be added to his cup of bitterness.
+In our long Sunday talk he told me of his home, and showed me the
+singularly beautiful photographs of his mother and sister, and--quite
+incidentally--one of himself in the full uniform of his regiment,
+bearing on its back the imprint of a Berlin photographer. He evinced a
+natural curiosity about the mode of our garrison life, and I prepared
+him as gently as I could for a decided change from his former customs.
+It was, of course, depressing to him, but he bore the prospect like
+a man, and gave it no importance as compared with his more essential
+downfall. He had seen enough of our troops to be especially uneasy at
+the prospect of an ill-fitting uniform. In the matter of linen he was
+well provided, but he was really unhappy over the thought of adapting
+his long and easy figure to a clothing-contractor's idea of proportion.
+So it was arranged that he should go to my tailor and be suitably clad,
+according to regulation of course, but also according to measure. He
+proposed, too, to leave his overcoat for some repairs and to be cared
+for while he should have no use for it. I gave the tailor assurances of
+prompt payment.
+
+One fine morning Dohna came to my room in his new rig and bade me a
+brave good-by. He was off for Fort Trumbull. I felt an almost parental
+sorrow over his going, and had much misgiving as to his ability to
+face his ill-bred soldier comrades. There came soon after a letter
+to say that he was well treated personally, only the rations were so
+horrible; pork and salt beef and beans and molasses. He could not eat
+such things, and he was growing faint for want of food. I had seen such
+dainty appetites cured too often to have any fear on this score, and
+only replied in general terms of encouragement, and asked for frequent
+letters. These came. There were no incidents of his life that were not
+described almost with wonder, for a noble officer of the Gardecorps of
+the king of Prussia knows really nothing of the ways of life of the
+men he is supposed to command. Often there were thick letters for the
+_fiancee_, and answers to these (also thick) had often to be forwarded.
+I felt the enthusiastic glow natural to one who carries alone the
+tender secrets of younger lovers, and was not altogether unhappy under
+the subjective romance of my mediation.
+
+Sometimes there were touching tales of trouble. Once he had been
+detailed to the "police" squad, and had to clean spittoons and do other
+menial work. This was a touch of reality that fairly opened his eyes to
+his abasement, and he wrote much more sadly than ever before, making
+me sad, too, to think how powerless I was to help him in any way. A
+few days later he sent a wail of real agony. While he had been out on
+drill, some scoundrel had broken into his satchel and had stolen all
+his papers,--his letters from his mother, her photograph, and those
+of his sister and his sweetheart, and all the bundle of affectionate
+epistles over which he had pored again and again in his desolation. The
+loss was absolutely heart-breaking and irreparable, and he had passed
+hours sitting on the rocks at the shore, pouring bitter tears into the
+Thames. This was a blow to me too. I knew that Dohna was of a simple
+mind, and utterly without resources within himself; but he was also of
+a simple heart, and one could only grieve over this last blow as over
+the sorrows of a helpless little child. However, I wrote all I could
+to encourage him, and was gratified, though a little surprised, to see
+how soon he became cheerful again, and how earnestly he seemed to have
+set about the work of becoming a really good soldier. After a time the
+captain of his company--still in New York and maintaining a lively
+interest in the poor fellow's case--procured an order for him to go to
+Annapolis to be examined for promotion. He was already a sergeant, and
+a pretty good one. He stopped in New York a few days on his way through
+for some refitting,--again at my tailor's. On his way back he stopped
+again to tell of his failure. I was delicate about questioning him too
+closely, but I learned enough to suppose that different ideas as to
+practical education are entertained by a board of army examiners and by
+a fond young mother in the remote castle of Schlodien; but I encouraged
+him to believe that a little more study would enable him to pass the
+second examination that had been promised him, and he rejoined his
+company.
+
+In the general mustering-out Voisin had been set free and had joined
+me in New York, and had, naturally, participated in all my interest in
+the quondam Count. He gradually, as an adjutant should, assumed the
+correspondence, which was voluminous, and by the time we were informed
+that Dohna was detailed for recruiting duty in the city, neither he
+nor I was glad to know it. Something more than a feeling of regretful
+sympathy is necessary to the enjoyment of frequent companionship,
+and we both felt that the fact of having credit with a tailor was a
+dangerous element in the possible future combinations. However, Dohna's
+arrival at our room followed close upon the announcement of the order.
+He was still simple in his way and of modest deportment, but he seemed
+to have accepted his new life almost too entirely, and he had come to
+look not very much out of place among his comrades. Their quarters
+were in a basement in Chambers Street, back of the City Hall, where we
+occasionally dropped in to see him. After a while he was always out
+when we called, and once when I stopped to give him a foreign letter,
+sent to my care, I was told that he had not been there for a week, but
+one of the men volunteered to find him. He came that night to the club
+for his letter, in civilian's dress, and appeared much as he did when
+I first saw him, except that he had two beautiful false teeth, in the
+place of the defective ones. I gave him his letter, a long one from
+Berlin, from his father. He showed Voisin the postscript, in which it
+was stated that a box containing a breech-loading shot-gun, a dozen
+shirts, and a draft for five hundred thalers would be forwarded by the
+Hamburg line to my care. On the strength of this he hoped it would not
+inconvenience us to advance him a couple of hundred dollars. It was
+thus far inconvenient that we were obliged to decline, which gave him
+no offence, and he invited us to dine with him the following day at the
+Everett House.
+
+At this point, in view of the extreme youth and inexperience of our
+friend, we took occasion to read him a short homily on the value of
+economy, and to urge him immediately to leave the Everett, return to
+his barracks in Chambers Street, and as he valued his future peace
+of mind to avoid running in debt; mildly hinting that, if found in
+the public streets without his uniform, he would be very likely to
+get himself into trouble. He begged that we would not expose him, and
+promised to return that very night. Then for some time we lost sight
+of him; his captain said that, so far as he knew, he was attentive
+to his duty with the recruiting squad, and he certainly kept out of
+our way. The box from Germany did not arrive. No more letters came,
+and we had no occasion to seek him out. It was evident that he was no
+longer unhappy, and so our interest in him, though still warm, remained
+inactive.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+One night I was awakened, quite late, by Voisin, sitting on the side
+of my bed, big-eyed and excited, and with a wonderful story to tell.
+He had been, at the request of the counsel of the Prussian Consul,
+to the detectives' rooms at police headquarters. Here he had been
+questioned as to his knowledge of one Adolph Danforth, _alias_ Graf zu
+Dohna-Schlodien, _alias_ Fritz Stabenow, and had subsequently had an
+interview with that interesting youth in the lock-up.
+
+The glory had all departed. He had been there forty-eight hours, was
+unwashed, uncombed, stolid, comfortable, and quite at home. There was
+no remnant left of the simple and modest demeanor of the well-bred
+aristocrat. It was hard to see a trace of likeness to the Kuerassier
+officer with whose photograph we were familiar. The obligations of
+_noblesse_ seemed to be entirely removed, and there was nothing left
+but plain, ignoble Fritz Stabenow. An examination of his pockets
+developed a singular folly. He had kept every scrap of paper on which
+a word had ever been written to him. Tailors' bills, love-letters,
+duns, photographs of half a dozen different girls, all were huddled
+together. He had a package of the Count Dohna cards and the plate
+from which they had been printed,--made in Boston; a letter of credit
+from a banking-house in Berlin to its New York correspondent had the
+copperplate card of the firm on the paper, but the paper was ruled as
+a German banker's paper never is, and the plate from which the card
+had been printed (also made in Boston) was in the envelope with it. A
+letter from plain father Stabenow enclosed photographs of still plainer
+mother and sister Stabenow, which were a sad contrast to the glory of
+the Countess Dohna's picture. The father's letter was full of kindly
+reproof and affectionate regret. "Ach! Fritz, ich haette das von Dir
+nicht gedacht,"--"I never thought that of you"; but it was forgiving
+too, and promised the remittance, clothing, and gun I have spoken of
+before. The papers, for the loss of which such tears had been shed
+at Fort Trumbull, were all there in their well-worn companionship
+with a soiled paper-collar, and that badge of dawning civilization, a
+tooth-brush.
+
+Here were also two photographs, one of the statue of Frederick the
+Great in Berlin on the card of a St. Louis photographer, and another of
+himself in Prussian uniform, on the card of a Berlin photographer. The
+pictures had been "lifted" and changed to the different cards. A more
+careful neglect of track-covering was never known. The evidence of all
+his deceptions had been studiously preserved.
+
+Voisin had given him a dollar to buy some necessary articles, and had
+left him to his fate.
+
+The disillusion was complete, and I saw that I had been swindled
+by a false count even more completely than I ever had been by real
+barons,--which is much to say.
+
+Voisin had gathered from the Consul's lawyer that this Stabenow, a
+valet of the veritable Count Dohna, had been one of a party who had
+robbed him and committed other serious crimes, and he had fled to
+this country, with his master's uniform, a valuable wardrobe, and
+costly jewels. He had here undertaken to personify the Count, and
+had had on the whole not an unhappy time, especially since he came
+to New York in recruiting service. He had finally been arrested on
+the complaint of a lady, one of the many whom he had attempted to
+blackmail, by threatening exposure through letters they had written
+him in the kindest spirit. Fortunately this one had had the good sense
+to refer the matter to her husband, who brought the interesting career
+to a close. He had obtained several thousand dollars in this way
+from different persons, and had contracted considerable debts in all
+directions. The Everett House was an especial sufferer.
+
+I felt that my claim was secured by the luggage at the express-office,
+and I called for it the next day. The gentlemanly clerk of the
+establishment blandly showed me my name, neatly written in a strange
+Teutonic hand, to a receipt for the property. Just then I had
+information that a box addressed to my care was lying at the Hoboken
+office of the German steamers. Indiscreetly mentioning this fact to the
+Prussian Consul's lawyer, I was informed that it would be necessary to
+take the box in evidence, and I prudently refrained from making further
+efforts for its recovery.
+
+It was with a chastened spirit that I paid a considerable bill at my
+tailor's and ordered the overcoat sent to my address; and it was with
+only mitigated satisfaction that I heard of the sending in irons to his
+company in California of deserter Stabenow.
+
+If the Herr Lieutenant Graf zu Dohna-Schlodien of the Gardecorps
+Kuerassier is still living, I beg to inform him that his overcoat--the
+only memento of a grave _Schwindelei_--is now a comfortable wrap to a
+Rhode Island farmer, who hopes that its rightful owner is as snugly
+clad in his winter rides about Versailles.
+
+
+
+
+TWO SCOUTS.
+
+
+In the desultory and sporadic warfare carried on in the Southwest,
+the scout--or "skeout," according to the dialect of the region--was a
+very important element of our organization, and it is amusing now to
+recall the variety of odd-fish of every description who applied for the
+remunerative employment that this branch of the service afforded.
+
+The interest of our life at Union City was not a little enhanced by two
+specimens of this genus with whom we had much to do,--Pat Dixon and
+"The Blind Preacher."
+
+One day the guard brought in a suspicious character from the
+picket-line. He was about twenty-five years old, long, lank, and
+dusky,--a sort of half-Indian, half-Irish looking fellow, with
+uncombed hair and an over-prominent quid of tobacco. He rode the
+usual "nag" of the country,--an animal with more blood than bone and
+more vice than beauty. He dismounted, passed his bridle over his arm,
+and "squatted,"--the usual posture of the country. "The Hun," the
+professional bully of all our culprits, took this creature in hand, and
+presently came in with a suggestion that I had better see him alone.
+He followed me cautiously to one side, leading his horse with him, and
+squatted again when we had halted at a safe distance from curious ears.
+
+"I'm Pat Dixon. I live down Troy way on the North Fork. Ye see, when
+this yer muss fust broke out I didn't go to take no sides in it. But
+Merryweather's men they come along a little 'fore sun-up, last month
+was a year, an' they taken the only nag we had left. I'd had him hid
+out all summer, but some derned skunk done found him out. I heern the
+cusses a trampin' roun' an' I was goin' to take a crack at 'em for
+'good mornin',' but, you see, I knowed if I did they'd just burn the
+old woman out, an' she don't git along but porely, anyhow, so I didn't.
+They _con_scripted the old man the year afore, an' he hain't been heern
+on sence. So I come to the conclushin that I wa'n't agoin' to stan' no
+such treatmint as that--by King! an' I jest took to the bresh, an' I
+reckon I've pestered them 'uns right smart. I ain't agoin' afoot long
+as theys hosses in West Tannisy,--you bet! I was agoin' to jine you
+Yanks, but thinks sez I: 'Old Pat, you kin do a heap better in the
+bresh nor what you kin in no army,' and so I stuck to it. O, now, I'm
+squar'! Frank Moore can tell you all 'bout me; I ain't no gum-game, I
+ain't. If you want a skeout, I'm on hand, an' I don't want no pass, I
+kin git 'roun' in this kentry.
+
+"Which? _hoss?_ Well, 't ain't much of a nag, but theys more on 'em
+roun', an' if this 'un tuckers out I'll git somethin' to ride. I ain't
+goin' afoot.--no, mam!"
+
+This was very much the sort of talk "Mr." Forrest's emissaries used in
+seeking our services for his purposes; so, partly to secure ourselves
+on this point, and partly to give Dixon a good character should he
+go out from our camp in his professional capacity, he was sent for a
+few days to the guard-house, until Frank Moore should return from an
+expedition. I believe Frank knew most of the vagabonds of Obion County,
+and he at once certified that this was no other than Pat Dixon; that
+his story was true; and that, while his controlling motives were not
+perhaps such as one would most admire, his unconquerable hatred of
+Merryweather's men and all their confederates might be relied on with
+implicit confidence; so Pat was engaged as an employe of our Secret
+Service Department, and sent outside the lines with a conspicuous
+assurance, as he left his fellow-prisoners, that if found again within
+our reach he would be hanged forthwith for a spy. I was riding on the
+road he took, and he gave me a leering wink as he departed,--with
+instructions to watch the movements of all guerilla bands in our front,
+and to bring speedily any information he might obtain.
+
+During the remaining months of our stay he was almost ubiquitous.
+Every scouting-party that we sent out in any direction, though entirely
+without notice to him, was pretty sure to meet him with important
+information, just when information was most needed.
+
+This part of his work was done perfectly, but he seemed to regard his
+relation with us as a warrant for unending private iniquities. After
+his own code of morals he was a strictly virtuous man, but his code was
+of an extremely loose and pliable character. It is probably safe to say
+that he never murdered a Union man, and that, unless sorely tempted by
+the difference in value of the animals, he never forcibly exchanged
+horses with a Union widow; neither, I believe, did he commit any
+offence against a known Rebel when there was a probability of his being
+found out and caught; but the complaints that came to us of the manner
+in which he vented his private wrongs and carried on the feuds of his
+ancestors gave us frequent annoyance. Sometimes it seemed necessary to
+recall his commission and declare him an outlaw, but just then there
+would transpire some particularly brilliant achievement that showed him
+invaluable for our purposes.
+
+More than once, when our patrols reported the immediate presence of
+the enemy, Pat would turn up with the assurance that it was only
+so-and-so's "band," who had come into the neighborhood on a visiting or
+a marauding expedition, but with no intention of putting themselves in
+our way; and invariably we found his report to be correct. Indeed, so
+frequently did this happen that we became almost too confident in his
+assistance, and when an excitable picket shot at a donkey or a cow in
+the night-time, although the patrol of the guard went through the usual
+routine of investigation, we felt that there could be no serious attack
+or Dixon would have notified us.
+
+How he obtained his information we could not guess, and his own
+account of the matter was never satisfactory; but I believe that no
+considerable force of the enemy ever crossed the Memphis and Charleston
+Railroad (the whole State's width to the south of us) without our
+being speedily notified; and through this means we were several times
+enabled to telegraph to Columbus early information of contemplated
+raids,--information that was not always heeded, as the surprise of
+Paducah (on the Ohio River) several days after our warning sufficiently
+proved.
+
+One ambition of this worthy man had to remain unsatisfied. How little
+this was due to the fact that we at the headquarters were all perfectly
+mounted, modesty makes it improper to state here; but in our frequent
+meetings as we rode outside the lines, he rarely failed to tell of
+some particularly fine horse belonging to some particularly bad man
+and especially virulent Rebel, which it would really be a virtue to
+"confisticate." The worthy fellow was not satisfied with his own
+conspicuous appropriations; he would fain have mounted our regiments on
+the weedy screws which the Rebel impressments had left for the horsing
+of the crippled region of Western Tennessee. Possibly, too, he may have
+had some lurking fear that there was a suspicion of iniquity in his
+thefts, and longed for the reassurance of similar conduct on the part
+of true men like ourselves.
+
+It was, of course, not long after the commencement of this active
+campaign against the rights of ownership, that we began to receive
+assurances on every hand that unless we could do something to repress
+Pat Dixon's vagabondage an outraged people would take the law into
+their own hands, and avenge the wrongs he had inflicted. With a
+laudable desire to prevent unnecessary bloodshed, I told him one day of
+the state of feeling against him, urging him to be more circumspect and
+to conduct himself like a decent man, else he would be hanged the first
+time he was caught; intimating, too, that it would be improper for us
+to continue to employ him to such needless injury to an inoffensive
+people. His reply was characteristic.
+
+"Inoffensive, _which_? Mebbe you know these people an' mebbe you
+don't. I do! and a dern'der lot of unhung cutthroats an' hoss-thieves
+you can't find nowheres. As for hangin', you needn't give yourself no
+worryment 'bout that. They're safe enough to hang me if they ketch me,
+an' I guess I sha'n't hang no higher if I go right on my own gait. If
+you don't want to employ me you needn't; theys enough corn an' bacon in
+th' Obion bottom to keep me awhile yet, and money ain't no 'count down
+here; but, by King! if I kin git a chance to tell you anything that
+them 'uns don't want you to know, you bet your skin I'll do it, an' you
+kin trust me every time, for I ain't goin' to lie,--not to your side,
+not if I know it. Why, you talk to me about inikities. I don't want to
+do no man any hurt; but my old dad _he_ was _con_scripted, an' me an'
+my brother Jake had to take to the bresh to save ourselves, an' then
+Jake he was shot in cold blood right afore my eyes, an' I made up my
+mind then an' there that I wouldn't give no quarter to the whole State
+of West Tannisy till this war was over an' ther' was some stronger hand
+than mine to do jestis an' to furnish revenge. That's all I've got to
+say about it. You needn't give yourself no oneasiness 'bout my doin's,
+I'll answer for the hull on 'em; an' p'r'aps the last thing you'll hear
+of Pat Dixon will be that he's hangin' to a tree somewheres down Troy
+way. I know I'm booked for that if I'm ketched, and till I am ketched
+I'm goin' my own gait."
+
+We had become too much accustomed to this state of feeling among the
+scanty Union population of the Southwest to be so shocked by it as we
+ought to have been, and it was not without sympathy with Dixon's wrongs
+that I let him go, with an earnest caution that he should mend his
+ways, if only for his own sake.
+
+It remains only to say that he _did_ go his own gait, and that he went
+it with a desperation and an _elan_ that I have never known equalled;
+and that, months later, after our snug quarters at Union City had been
+turned over to a feeble band of home-guards, word came that they had
+been burned to the ground, and that Pat Dixon, betrayed at last into
+the hands of the enemy, had been hanged in the woods near Troy. We
+could find no fault with the retribution that had overtaken him; for,
+viewed with the eyes of his executioners, he had richly merited it: but
+we had learned to like him for his frank and generous qualities, and to
+make full allowance for the degree to which his rough, barbaric nature
+had been outraged and inflamed by the wrongs inflicted on his family.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A returning patrol one afternoon led to the parade-ground a sorry
+horse drawing an open wagon in which were a man and a woman. The woman
+had a cold-blooded, stolid look, and her eyes were filled with the
+overflowing hatred we so often inspired among her sex at the South. Her
+husband was dressed in black, and wore a rather scrupulously brushed
+but over-old silk hat. In his hand was a ponderous and bulging cotton
+umbrella.
+
+They had been taken "under suspicious circumstances" at a house a few
+miles outside the lines,--the suspicion attaching only to the fact that
+they were not members of the family and seemed to have no particular
+business in that region. When asked for an explanation, the woman said
+she had nothing to say but that her husband was a blind clergyman
+intending to fulfil an engagement to preach, and that she had driven
+him, as was her habit. He said nothing. It was a rule of our system to
+follow Hoyle's instructions, and "when in doubt to take the trick":
+this pair were remanded to the guard-house.
+
+As they turned away, the reverend gentleman said, in a feeble voice,
+that if he could see me alone later in the evening, when he had
+recovered from the shock of his capture, I might be willing to talk
+with him. In the evening the Hun repaired to the dismantled warehouse
+where the prisoners were lodged, to hold conversation with the
+new-comers. When he came to the clergyman he found him so low spoken
+that their talk fell almost to a whisper, but it was whispered that
+he was to be taken alone, and subsequent disclosures led to his being
+brought to headquarters. He there informed me that he was a minister
+of the Methodist church, Canadian by birth and education, but married
+to a lady of that region, and had been for some years engaged there in
+his capacity as a circuit preacher. He was quite blind, and found it
+impossible to make his rounds without being driven.
+
+His sympathies were with the North, and he was burning to make himself
+useful in the only way left him by his infirmity. His wife was of
+a suspecting disposition, and their peaceful consorting required
+that she should always accompany him; but, unfortunately, she was a
+violent secessionist, and he had been compelled, in the interest of
+the peaceful consorting above named, to acknowledge sympathy with her
+views, and to join her in her revilings of the Union army.
+
+All this made his position difficult, yet he believed that, if the
+opportunity were given him, he could hide his intention even from her,
+and could gather for us much useful information.
+
+He was a welcome visitor at the houses of the faithful, far and near,
+and warmed their hearts with frequent and feeling exhortation, as he
+gathered his little meetings at his nightly stopping-places. He was now
+about starting for the southern circuit, and had appointments to preach
+and to pray at every town between us and Bolivar.
+
+Evidently, if this man were honest in his intentions, he could be of
+great service, but I suggested the difficulty that having once started
+for an appointed round he could not return to bring us any information
+he might receive. To this he replied that his wife believed him to be
+in Forrest's service, and that he could at any time come as a spy into
+our lines.
+
+It seemed a very questionable case, but, after consultation with Voisin
+and the Hun, it was determined to give him a trial, to prevent his wife
+from seeing more than was necessary of our position, and to believe so
+much as we liked of the information he might give us. The conditions of
+the engagement were agreed upon, and after a severe public admonition,
+and threats especially appalling to his wife, he was sent outside the
+lines, with hints of the serious consequences that would follow his
+second capture.
+
+We were never quite sure that his wife was wrong in crediting him
+with complicity with Forrest; but the worst that could be said of him
+(and this was very likely true) was that he was pre-eminently a man
+of peace, and if he gave information to both sides, it was always
+information in compliance with the injunctions of his sacred calling.
+The Rebel forces several times crossed into Tennessee, and came toward
+us in numbers that indicated foul intentions, but, from the time
+our pious friend first visited us, they invariably withdrew without
+an engagement. Frequently small expeditions of our own forces went
+scouting to the southward, and were checked and turned back by the
+reports of this benevolent man.
+
+He may have kept us from the successful fulfilment of some bloody
+intentions, but we had occasion to know from other sources that he
+sometimes kept small detachments of our troops from falling in with
+overpowering numbers of the enemy. Be the theory what it may, from
+November until February there was no conflict of arms in all the
+counties we traversed, and neither side advanced to within deadly range
+of the other.
+
+The processes of this emissary were hidden and curious. He was
+employed in a much more regulated manner than Dixon, and we generally
+knew his whereabouts. Every interview had with him, either within our
+own camp or when we were abroad, had to be so skilfully managed that no
+suspicion, even in the eyes of his catlike wife, should attach to him.
+He never came into our lines except as an unwilling prisoner, and was
+never sent without them without dire admonition as to the consequences
+of his return.
+
+On one occasion Pat Dixon reported that a detachment of Forrest's
+command, about three hundred strong, had crossed the railroad and was
+moving north in the direction of our camp. At this time the preacher
+was near us, and I had an interview with him. He doubted the report,
+but would investigate. I told him we would start the next day, with
+five hundred men, in the direction of Trenton,--where he was to hold a
+prayer-meeting at the house of one of Forrest's captains. The meeting
+was held, and after it was over, the subject of the advance was talked
+over very freely by the officers present, he sitting in a rapt state of
+unconsciousness--his thoughts on higher things--at the chimney-corner.
+Pleading an early appointment at McKenzie's Station for the following
+day, he left as soon as the moon was up, and drove to the house of a
+friend in the village. His wife supposed that he was coming with a
+false report to lead us into a trap laid for us.
+
+We arrived at McKenzie's at one o'clock in the morning, after a
+detestably cold, hard ride, and took up our quarters in a half-finished
+and half-furnished house, where we struggled the whole night through in
+the endeavor to get heat out of a fire of wet dead-wood. Early in the
+morning the Hun started out, in his fiercest mood, with a small escort,
+seeking for information and hunting up suspicious characters. At
+breakfast-time he came upon a large family comfortably seated at table,
+with our preacher and his wife as guests.
+
+He was asked to "sit by." "Thank you; I have come for more serious
+business. Who is at the head of this house? I should like to see you
+alone, sir." The trembling, invalided paterfamilias was taken into an
+adjoining room, and put through the usual course of questions as to his
+age, place of birth, occupation, condition as to literacy, the number
+of negroes owned, the amount of land, what relatives in the Rebel army,
+to what extent a sympathizer with the Rebellion, when he had last
+seen any Rebel soldiers or scouts or guerillas or suspicious persons
+of any description, and so on, through the tortuous and aggravating
+list that only a lawyer could invent. Questions and answers were taken
+down in writing. The sterner questions were spoken in a voice audible
+to the terror-stricken family in the adjoining room. The man, of
+course, communicated nothing, and probably knew nothing, of the least
+consequence. He was sent to a third room and kept under guard. His case
+disposed of, his wife was examined in like manner, and then the other
+members of the family. Finally, the coast being clear, our emissary
+was sent for. He came into the room chuckling with delight over
+this skilful exercise of the art of deceit, in which he was himself
+such an adept, and laying his hand on the Hun's arm, said, "My dear
+fellow, I respect you. This has been the most brilliant dodge I ever
+knew,--capital,--capital!" And he then went on to recount all that he
+had heard the evening before. A large detachment of Forrest's command
+was advancing under Faulkner's leadership, and they doubtless had by
+this time a full report of our position, for he had met acquaintance on
+the road who had reported it to him. If we were able to engage a body
+of three thousand men without artillery, we might find them that night
+in Trenton,--he was confident that that was about their number.
+
+The family were now notified that they had been guilty of a great
+offence in harboring a known spy of the enemy; but they insisted
+that they knew him only as a devout and active minister, and had no
+suspicion, nor could they believe, that he had the least knowledge of
+or interest in either army. With due warning as to the consequences
+of a repetition of their crime, they were allowed to return to their
+breakfast, and their guest was brought under guard to headquarters.
+
+Being satisfied, after a close examination of the report, that it
+would be imprudent to remain so far from our camp, which could be best
+reached from Trenton by another road, we left a party of observation,
+and returned to Union City, directing our scout to go to the vicinity
+of Trenton and bring to our detachment any information he might obtain.
+Twelve hours after our arrival home, the detachment returned with the
+news that Faulkner, with a large force, had moved toward Mayfield,
+Kentucky, and the event proved that every item of the intelligence we
+had received had been substantially correct.
+
+In this manner we were enabled to learn pretty definitely the
+character of any movement of the enemy anywhere in Western Tennessee,
+and so far as we had opportunity to investigate the reports they
+generally proved to be essentially true. These two scouts were worth
+more as a source of information, than would have been two regiments of
+cavalry in active service. Sometimes our Methodist friend acted under
+definite orders, but more often only according to his own judgment of
+what was necessary.
+
+A few days before Christmas we received word that Forrest in person
+was in Jackson, with a large force, and we moved against him with
+nearly the whole body of our troops, under the command of old A. J.
+himself. We reached Jackson at night, after three days' hard marching,
+only to find that Forrest's army had left that morning, destroying
+the bridges over the swollen rivers and making organized pursuit
+impossible. We took up quarters for some days in the town, where we
+enjoyed the peculiarly lovely climate of the "sunny South" with the
+thermometer seven degrees below zero, six inches of snow on the ground,
+and a howling wind blowing. Our own mess was very snugly entertained
+at the house of a magnate, where we had an opportunity to study the
+fitness of even the best Southern architecture for an Arctic winter
+climate.
+
+On New Year's day, as we were sitting at a sumptuous dinner, and
+mitigating so far as we could the annoyance to our hosts of being
+invaded by a rollicking party of Northern officers, Voisin, who had
+been called out, returned to the table to tell me that a man and a
+woman would like to see me in my room. I was not prompt to respond, and
+asked who they were. He replied, "O, who can tell? I suppose somebody
+with a complaint that our men have 'taken some hams of meat' ["meat"
+being the Tennessee vulgate for hog flesh only], or something of that
+sort; the man seemed to have something the matter with his eyes." And
+he gave me a large and expressive wink.
+
+Ensconced, with such comfort as large and rattling windows permitted,
+before our blazing fire, sat our serene Methodist friend and his sullen
+wife. Taking me aside, he told me that he had passed the previous
+evening at a private house between Jackson and Bolivar in religious
+exercises, which were attended by Forrest and officers of his command.
+After the devotions there was much cheerful and unrestrained talk as
+to the plans and prospects of the future campaign, disclosing the
+fact that as there seemed no chance of doing efficient service in
+Tennessee, the whole body would move at once to Central Mississippi
+and operate in connection with the army in Georgia. This report, which
+we had no reason to disbelieve, decided A. J. to abandon a difficult
+and unpromising pursuit, and to return to Union City and Columbus. We
+found, on our return, a communication from the headquarters at Memphis
+to the effect that Forrest had crossed the railroad and gone far south
+into Mississippi.
+
+We had no further service of importance or interest in this region.
+"Jackson's Purchase" was thenceforward quite free from any considerable
+body of the enemy; and when our clergyman found, a few weeks later,
+that we were all ordered to the south, he came for a settlement of his
+accounts, saying that he had been able to deceive his wife only up to
+the time of our interview at Jackson, and as his life was no longer
+safe in the country, he must depart for the more secure region of his
+former home in Canada,--where let us hope that he has been allowed to
+answer the behests of his sacred vocation with a mind single to his
+pious duties, and that domestic suspicion no longer clouds his happy
+hearthstone.
+
+Happily, neither A. J. nor Forrest himself had further occasion for his
+peaceful intervention, the fortunate absence of which may have had to
+do with the notable encounter between these two generals at Tupelo.
+
+
+
+
+IN THE GLOAMING.
+
+
+The sun had gone, and above the dreamy blue of the far-lying woods,
+the early evening had hung the sky with mellow, summery, twilight
+loveliness.
+
+The casements of the old house at Whittington glowed ruddy and warm
+through their marvellous clustering ivy, and it was the idlest luxury
+to hang over the crumbling road-wall, peopling its suggestive chambers
+with the spirits of their long-gone tenants. It is a farm-house now,
+and there is no available record to tell the stranger the story of
+its more glorious days. No rigid history hampers the fancy, and the
+strolling lover of the by-ways and roadsides of our dear Mother England
+may let his imagination run with flowing rein, sweeping away the
+hayricks and marigold beds, and calling back the peacocks and bagwigs
+of the halcyon days.
+
+Perhaps for the last time in my life I was taking the breath of an
+English twilight,--sweetest to those whose childhood and youth have fed
+on the rhyme and tale the green old land has sent to her world-wide
+brood, and who come, in riper life, to find the fancies of early years
+warm and living on every side, in hedge and field, in cowslip and
+primrose, in nightingale and lark. The thick-coming impressions such
+musing brings are vague and dreamy, so that there seemed a shade of
+unreality in the quiet voice that bade me "Good evening," and added,
+"Yes, it is an engaging old house, and it has a story that you may be
+glad to hear."
+
+It was not from perversity that I turned the subject, but no tale of
+real life could have added interest to the fancies with which the old
+manse had clad itself in the slowly waning day. Wayside impressions
+lose their charm if too much considered, and, as my new companion was
+walking toward Lichfield, I was glad to turn away and join him,--ending
+a long day's tramp with the slow and quiet gait that his age compelled.
+There was the least shade of the uncanny in his bearing, and his speech
+was timorous and gentle. His threadbare and seedy look betokened a
+native unthrift, but there was an undercurrent of refinement in his
+mien and in his manner, and a trusting outlook from his large blue eyes
+that made him the fittest of companions for a summer evening's walk in
+a country filled with the mingled flavor of history and romance.
+
+He was a man of the intensest local training. To him "the County of
+the City of Lichfield" was of more consequence than all Staffordshire
+besides, and far more than all England and all that vague entity called
+the World. Even the County of the City of Lichfield was large for his
+concentrated attachment: he knew it as one must know a small town in
+which he has passed the whole of a long life; but his heart lay within
+the cathedral close, and the cathedral close lay deep within his
+heart,--deep and warm, with its history and its traditions, its romance
+and its reality, so interlaced that he had long since ceased to ask
+what was real and what unreal. All was unreal in the sense of being of
+more than worldly consequence in his estimation, and all real as a part
+of the training of his whole life.
+
+To him Lichfield Cathedral was no mere pile of sculptured stone, built
+round with the facts of recorded history; it was the fairy handiwork
+of times and scenes long past, its walls raised by the hand of pious
+enthusiasm, shattered and cemented by the strife and blood of the civil
+war, hallowed by the returning glory of the Restoration, blessed by the
+favor of royal presence, and now made admirable in his daily sight by
+the dignity and grace of those holy men its dean and chapter.
+
+As it was the cathedral I had come to see, and as I had come for no
+architect's measurements, for no student's lore, only to bathe in the
+charmed atmosphere of its storied past, I had fallen upon a guide
+after my own heart, and it was as pleasant as it was easy to lend full
+credence to all he so honestly believed and told.
+
+In early life he had had gentler training, but he had long been a Poor
+Brother of the Hospital of St. John the Baptist in Lichfield, and had,
+for many years, held, by seniority, the right of presenting a rose, on
+St. John's nativity day, to the heirs of William Juvenis (goldsmith),
+who, by grants made in consideration of this ceremony, had secured
+perennial prayers for the souls of his ancestors and a fragrant memory
+for his own.
+
+Hedged about by the traditionary customs and quaint observances of an
+ancient charitable foundation, deadened in a way, if you please, by the
+aristocratic pauperism of his condition, my gentle companion had grown
+to his present dreamy estate.
+
+As we reached Stow Pool, near the old parish church of St. Chad, he
+pointed out the spring of pure water where, twelve hundred years ago,
+this future Bishop of Lichfield--who during his hermit life supported
+himself on the milk of a doe--was wont to pray naked in the water,
+standing upon the stone still seen at the bottom of the well, and where
+St. Ovin heard the angels sing as his good soul passed away.
+
+Then, with the trusting look of a little child, the Poor Brother went
+on to tell of the virtues and good deeds of this holy life;--how
+even the King of the Mercians, struck with remorse for the crimes he
+had committed, visited the saint in person, yielded to his eloquent
+persuasion, became a convert to the true faith, and banished all
+idolatry from his realm; how he became the head of the church of
+Lichfield and laid its strong foundations of piety and faith; and how
+his virtues so outlived him that his very tomb swallowed the ill-humors
+of diseased minds resorting to its serene presence, that the dust
+from his grave healed all ills of man and beast, and that the shrine
+built in his honor after his canonization was so sought by numberless
+devotees that Lichfield itself began thereupon to increase and flourish.
+
+To our left, as he ceased, the evening's lingering glow gilded the
+silent pool, where lay the unrippled reflection of the three spires of
+the cathedral, hardly more unsubstantial than the fairy silhouette that
+stood clean-cut against the sky, and dividing with the reality the rapt
+admiration of the Poor Brother of St. John's.
+
+We stood by the water's edge, and he turned toward the phantom spires
+reversed within it, his talk wandering back to the days of the church's
+troubles,--when the cathedral close was a fortress, with strong walls
+and well-filled moat; when the beautiful west gate, which only our
+own age was vile enough to destroy, kept stout ward against the outer
+world, and protected the favored community who formed within the walls
+a county independent of Lichfield and of Staffordshire. Within the
+sacred pale no law had force save that of the Ecclesiastical Court, and
+then, as now, none could there be taken for debt or crime save on the
+warrant of the dean and chapter.
+
+He knew by heart the long list of bishops, and would gladly have held
+me to hear of the good deeds of Langton and Hackett. He was fairly
+launched in his favorite enthusiasm, and told warmly the more striking
+features of the church's history, but he told them rapidly lest I
+should reach the storied pile with less than a full appreciation of its
+traditional interest.
+
+From his nervous lips I learned how King Richard II. kept Christmas
+revels here with a splendor that lavished two hundred tuns of wine,
+and roasted two thousand oxen, whose bones are still found in Oxenbury
+field hard by; how Elizabeth passed three whole days in the close; and
+how the solidity of its fortification, the consummate grace and finish
+of its architecture, the richness of its sculpture, and the surpassing
+beauty and magnificence of the nine windows of its lady chapel marked
+it as the crowning glory of the Western Church, until the dark days
+of the Revolution lowered. Then its sore trials were recounted, and
+I learned of the fanatical attack of Lord Brooke, "with his horde of
+impious Roundheads," made by strange fatality on St. Chad's day; of the
+shooting of Lord Brooke by "Dumb Dyott," who was perched in the steeple
+with a fowling-piece that now hangs over the fireplace of Colonel
+Dyott's house; of the surrender of the close by Lord Chesterfield; of
+the sack and bout that followed; of the recapture by Prince Rupert.
+
+He told of the foul desecration by the Roundheads, who used every
+species of havoc, plunder, and profanation,--pulling down the sacred
+effigies which were the glory of the western front, hacking to pieces
+the curious carvings of the choir, mashing the noses of the monumental
+statues, destroying the valuable evidences and records of the church
+and the city, shattering the glass of the costly windows,--save only
+that of the marvellous nine of the lady chapel, which a pious care was
+said to have removed to a place of safety. They kept courts of guard in
+the cross aisles, broke up the pavements, and every day hunted a cat
+with hounds throughout the church, delighting in the echoes from the
+vaulted roof; they wrapped a calf in linen, and "in derision and scorn
+of the sacrament of baptism," sprinkled it at the font and gave it a
+name.
+
+How the King, after the defeat of Naseby, came from Ashby-de-la-Zouche,
+and passed the night in the close,--how Cromwell's defaming crew
+completed the work of demolition and desecration, and smashed the old
+bell called "Jesus," with its legend "I am the bell of Jesus, and
+Edward is our King; Sir Thomas Heywood first caused me to ring,"--how,
+finally, the chapter-house alone had a roof under which service might
+be said,--how the good Hackett on the first day of his bishopric set
+his own servants and his own coach-horses at work removing the rubbish,
+and never tired until in eight years' time the magnificence of the
+cathedral was restored, except for the forever irreparable loss of the
+decorations, and especially of the lady chapel windows, which all the
+cost of the restoration would not have sufficed to renew,--how the
+church was reconsecrated with great pomp and solemnity,--all this he
+told me in detail, and he would gladly have told more, for this Poor
+Brother had made these few rich historic acres nearly his whole world,
+and had peopled it with all who throughout the long ages had marred it
+or had made it. To have given "two good trees" for the rebuilding of
+the church was a title to his lasting and grateful recognition.
+
+But the light was fast waning, and the cathedral must be seen now or
+perhaps never. It was already past the hour for closing, but one of
+the vergers had formerly been a Poor Brother of St. John's, and my
+companion went to him to secure our admission.
+
+I stood before the west front of the cathedral, which was then bathed
+in the lingering light of the after-day, its great central window
+gleaming as though the altar lamps were still burning behind it, and
+the western spires almost losing themselves in the sky. The quaint
+effigies that fill the niches across the whole facade lost their
+grotesqueness in the dusk, and seemed really the sacred sculptures they
+were meant to be. Fair though this rich front must be at high midday,
+it needs for its full beauty the half-light of a Northern evening. As
+seen on that rarest of all evenings, it was a fit introduction to the
+subdued glory which greeted us in the dim religious light to which we
+entered as the great central door closed behind us.
+
+We stood, uncovered and reverent, beneath the vaulted nave, looking
+down the long curved aisle, bordered by the majesty of the clustered
+columns, through the light illuminated screen of the choir, full upon
+the sculptured and gem-set alabaster reredos, above and beyond which
+stood the famed group of windows of the lady chapel, mellowed by the
+light of the streaming full moon.
+
+Rich in the blended mosaic of the floor, in the dimmed canopy overhead,
+in the lightly arched gallery of the triforium, in the mellow
+cross-lights of the side windows, in the sombre carvings of the choir,
+and above all in the marvellous glass of the chapel, it was the very
+perfection of a worshipful church.
+
+It was too nearly dark to examine the details of the decoration, and we
+wandered down the aisles, remarking here and there the bruised statues
+of the tombs, and halting before the sleeping children of Chantrey to
+marvel how much somnolent repose can be cut in chiselled stone.
+
+"But come," said the gentle Brother, "we have only light enough left
+for the storied glass which alone of all the richness of the old church
+outlived its desecration, and, as by a miracle, was preserved to tell
+these later generations of the higher art our forefathers' sons forgot."
+
+As he spoke, we stood within the charmed light of the nine windows of
+the apse,--windows which have perhaps no remaining equals in the world,
+and before which one can only bow in admiration and regret for an art
+that seems forever lost. Holding me fast by the arm, he went on:--
+
+"In the restoration of the church, the spandrels of the old windows
+were rebuilt, and the frames were set with plain glass, to the sad
+defacement of the edifice; and so they stood for nigh two hundred
+years, no art being equal to their worthy replacement, and no ancient
+store to the supplying of so large a demand.
+
+"But listen, now, how the hand of Heaven sheltered its own, and how
+true servants of the Church are ever guided to reclaim its lost
+splendor.
+
+"A few years ago, a canon of the cathedral, travelling in Flanders,
+wishing to contribute to the renewed work of restoration, visited the
+dismantled convent of Herkenrode in the ancient bishopric of Liege.
+Here he sought among the rubbish of the lumber-room for wood-carvings
+which might be used in the rebuilding of the prebendal stalls. His
+search discovered many boxes of colored glass, the origin of which no
+one knew, and whose existence even had been forgotten. Thinking to
+embellish some of the curious triangular windows above the triforium,
+he purchased the whole store for two hundred pounds of our money, and
+presented it to the dean and chapter as a tribute of affectionate
+devotion to the cathedral. There was more than he had supposed, and the
+large figures of some of the fragments indicated a coherent design.
+
+"This chapel was fenced off from the aisles, and here the canon's wife
+and daughter, devoting themselves to the solution of the puzzle, slowly
+pieced out the varying connections. They worked patiently for weeks,
+with a steadily increasing excitement of success, until [and here his
+grasp grew tremulous and close], lying collated on this pavement where
+we stand, only a bit wanting here and there, marking the exact sizes
+of the varied openings, the grand old Lichfield windows, perfect as
+you see them now in this softened moonlight, had come back to enrich
+forevermore the dear old church to whose glory they had shone in the
+bygone centuries, and whose sore trials their absence had so long
+recalled.
+
+"Kind stranger," said he, "this is a true tale. Sceptics have
+questioned it, but it is true! true! And I thank Heaven that it has
+been permitted to me, who have grown old in the love of this sacred
+pile, to live to see, in this crowning act of its restoration, the
+higher help the hand of man has had in performing its holy work."
+
+His upturned blue eyes were moistened with tears, and his voice
+trembled with emotion. I led him gently away and to the doorstep of
+the Hospital of St. John the Baptist, where we parted in silence, and
+forever.
+
+Supping at the Swan Inn, I took the late train for Liverpool and home,
+bringing with me an ideal Lichfield, to which it would perhaps have
+been rash to hold the light of a Lichfield day.
+
+
+
+
+FOX-HUNTING IN ENGLAND.
+
+
+On entering the Regent Hotel at Leamington the first object that
+attracts attention, after the stuffy old porter who hobbles about
+to see some one else handle the luggage, is a small frame, over the
+smoking coal-fire, which contains the following notice, decorated with
+an old cut of a fox's mask:--
+
+ MERRY & CO.'S HUNTING APPOINTMENTS, AND GUIDE TO THE DIFFERENT COVERTS.
+
+                                                    December 30, 1872.
+
+                      WARWICKSHIRE,--at 10.45.
+
+ _Days._    _Meet at_         _Miles._     _To go through_
+    M.       Goldicote House.   11.         Wellerbourne and Loxley.
+   Tu.       Radway Grange.     12.         Tachbrook and Kineton.
+    W.       Snitterfield.       7.         Warwick and Stratford Road.
+   Th.       Red Hill.          13.         Warwick and Snitterfield.
+    F.       Pebworth.          16.         Warwick and Stratford.
+
+                    NORTH WARWICKSHIRE,--at 11.
+
+    M.       Solihull.          14.         Warwick and Hatton.
+   Tu.       Cubbington Gate.    2.         Lillington.
+   Th.       Stoneleigh Abbey.   4.         On Kenilworth Road.
+    F.       Tile Hill.          9.         By Kenilworth Castle.
+
+                       PYTCHLEY,--at 10.45.
+
+    M.       Naseby.            26.         Princethorpe and Rugby.
+   Tu.       Hazlebeach.        31.         Dunchurch and Crick.
+    W.       Dingley.           33.         Rugby and Swinford.
+    F.       Cransley.          36.         Maidwell.
+    S.       Swinford.          19.         Princethorpe and Rugby.
+
+                       ATHERSTONE,--at 11.
+
+    M.       Coombe.            12.         Bubbenhall and Wolston.
+    W.       Harrow Inn Gate.   20.         Coventry and Nuneaton.
+    F.       Brinklow Station.  12.         Bubbenhall and Wolston.
+    S.       Corley.            14.         Stoneleigh and Coventry.
+
+                       BICESTER,--at 10.45.
+
+    M.       Fenny Compton.     12.         Radford and Ladbrook.
+   Tu.       Trafford Bridge.   19.         Southam and Wormleighton.
+   Th.       Hellidon.          14.         Southam and Priory Marston.
+    S.       Steeple Claydon.   40.         Gaydon and Banbury.
+
+Twenty-two meets in the week, all within easy reach, by road or
+rail. Let us dine and decide. At table we will leave the _menu_ to
+the waiter; but let him bring for consideration during the meal the
+list of _meets_. "Brinklow Station, twelve miles"; that seems the most
+feasible thing in the catalogue for the morrow, and who has not heard
+that the Atherstone is a capital pack? But then the Pytchley is even
+better known, and the train reaches Rugby in time for the meet. Let
+the choice be decided with the help of coffee and cigars and possible
+advice, during the soothing digestive half-hour in the smoking-room.
+Dinner over, wander away through the tortuous, dim passage that leads
+to the sombre hall where alone in English inns the twin crimes of
+billiards and smoking are permitted, and, while writhing under the
+furtive glances of the staid and middle-aged East-Indian who evidently
+knows you for an American, and who is your only companion, decide,
+with your nation's ability to reach conclusions without premises,
+whether it shall be Pytchley or Atherstone. Don't ask your neighbor:
+he is an Englishman, and have we not been told that Englishmen are
+gruff, reticent men, who wear thick shells, and whose warm hearts can
+be reached only with the knife of a regular introduction? However, you
+must make up your mind what to do, and you need help which neither
+the waiter nor the porter can give; the "gentlemanly clerk" does not
+exist in England (thank Heaven!) and you have not yet learned what an
+invaluable mine of information "Boots" is,--faithful, useful, helpful,
+and serviceable to the last degree. I salute him with gratitude for
+all he has done to make life in English hotels almost easier and more
+home-like than in one's own house. It is safe to advise all travellers
+to make him an early ally, to depend on him, to use him, almost to
+abuse him, and, finally, on leaving, to "remember" him. Not yet having
+come to know the Boots, I determined to throw myself on the tender
+mercies of my stern, silent companion, and I very simply stated my
+case. My stern, silent companion was an exception to the rule, and he
+told me all I wanted to know (and more than I knew I needed to know)
+with a cordiality and frankness not always to be found among the genial
+smokers of our own hotels. His voice was in favor of the Atherstone as
+being the most acceptable thing for the next day.
+
+Ford, the veterinary surgeon of Leamington, had, on several
+occasions, done good service for friends who had gone before me over
+the hedges of North Warwickshire, and I went to him for advice about a
+mount. Here I found that I had made a mistake in not engaging horses in
+advance. To get a "hunter" for the next day would be impossible, but
+he would do what he could for a few days hence. All he could promise
+for the morning would be to lend me a horse of his own, a thoroughbred
+mare, not up to my weight, but tough and wiry, and good for any amount
+of road-work. He kindly volunteered to arrange for our going by the
+first train to Coventry, only a couple of miles from Brinklow (it
+turned out to be nine miles), so that we should arrive fresh on the
+ground. At seven o'clock in the morning he came to my room to say
+that everything was arranged, and that I should find the mare at the
+station in an hour. Swallowing a glass of milk as a stay-stomach,--my
+usual habit,--I put myself, for the first time since the war ended,
+into breeches and boots, and drove to the station. On a turn-out stood
+a "horse-box," one of the institutions of England,--a three-stabled
+freight-car for the transportation of horses. Paying five shillings for
+a horse-ticket to Coventry (only twice the cost of my own seat), I saw
+the mare snugly packed into one of the narrow stalls and made fast for
+the journey. Passing through a beautiful farming country, we came in
+due time to the quaint old town of Coventry, where several horse-boxes,
+coming from Birmingham and other stations, were discharging their
+freight of well-bred hunters. As we rode from this station another
+hard-shelled Englishman in brown top-boots and spotless white leather
+breeches accosted me pleasantly, reminding me that we had come from
+London together the day before, and asking, as he had recognized me for
+an American, if he could be of service to me.
+
+"Pray how did you know that I am from America?"
+
+"Only by your asking if you should change 'cars' at Rugby. An
+Englishman would have said 'carriages.'"
+
+"Very well; I am glad my ear-mark was no greater. Can you direct me to
+a hotel where I can get a bite before I go on?"
+
+"Certainly: you will find the Angel very comfortable; take the next
+street to the right, and you will soon reach it. Good morning; it is
+nine miles to the meet, and I will move on slowly. Command me if I can
+help you when you come up."
+
+I did find the Angel comfortable, (as what English inn is not?) and
+soon fortified myself with cold pheasant and sherry,--a compact
+and little-burdensome repast to ride upon,--served in a cosey old
+coffee-room by the neatest and most obliging of handmaidens.
+
+On the road I fell in with straggling groups of horsemen, in red coats
+and black coats, leather breeches and cords, white tops and black;
+all neat and jaunty, and all wearing the canonical stove-pipe hat. My
+little mare was brisk, and I had no hard riding to save her for, so I
+passed a dozen or more of the party, getting from each one some form or
+other of pleasant recognition, and finally from a handsome young fellow
+on a very spicy mount, "Excuse me, are you going to Brinklow? You must
+turn to the right."
+
+Confound these Englishmen, thought I, where is their traditional
+coldness and reserve? And I reined up for a chat.
+
+My companion came from the vicinity of Birmingham. Like so many of
+his class, he devotes three days a week to systematic hunting, and
+he was as enthusiastic as an American boy could have been in telling
+me all I wanted to know about the sport. To get hold of a grown man
+who had never seen a foxhound seemed an event for him, and my first
+instructions were very agreeably taken. Our road ran past the beautiful
+deer-stocked park of Coombe Abbey, where the green grass of a moist
+December and the thick clustering growth of all-embracing ivy carried
+the fresh hues of our summer over the wide lawn and to the very tops
+of the trees about the grand old house. The few villages on our way
+were neither interesting nor pleasant, but the thatched farm-houses and
+cottages, and the wonderful ivy, and the charming fields and hedges
+were all that could have been asked.
+
+And then the roadsides! and the stiles and the foot-paths, and the
+look of age and the richness of the well-kept farms; and again and
+everywhere the ivy clinging fast to each naked thing, and clothing it
+with luxuriant beauty!
+
+There is in all our hearts an inherited chord that thrills in the
+presence of this dear old home of our race. Not this spot and not these
+scenes, but the air, the tone, the spirit of it all,--these are as
+familiar to our instincts as water to the hen-brooded duckling.
+
+Brinklow Station has the modern hideousness and newness of railroad
+stations everywhere in country neighborhoods, and it was pleasant to
+leave it behind and follow the gay crowd down a sloping and winding
+road into the real country again, and into a handsome and well-kept
+park, beyond which there stood a fine old house of some pretension, and
+well set about with terraced lawn and shrubbery,--a charming English
+country-seat.
+
+Here my eyes were greeted with the glory of my first "meet," and a
+glory it was indeed! Pictures and descriptions had suggested it, but
+they had only suggested it. This was the reality, and it far exceeded
+my anticipation. The grounds were fairly alive with a brilliant
+company of men and women,--happy and hearty, and just gathered for the
+day's sport. Red coats, white breeches, and top-boots were plenty,
+and the neat holiday air of the whole company was refreshing and
+delightful. Scattered about singly and in groups, mounted, on foot,
+and in carriages, were a couple of hundred people of all ages and of
+all conditions. Chatting from the saddle and over carriage-doors,
+lounging up and down the Drive, or looking over the hounds, the
+company were leisurely awaiting the opening of the ball. They had
+come from a circuit of twenty miles around, and they appeared to be
+mainly people who habitually congregate at the cover-side throughout
+the hunting-season, and to be generally more or less acquainted with
+each other. The element of coquetry was not absent; but coquetry is
+apparently not a natural product of the English soil, and that sort
+of intercourse was not conspicuous. The same number of handsome young
+men and women would be more demonstrative at a similar gathering
+in America. A similar gathering, however, would not be possible in
+America. We have no occasion on which people of all sorts come so
+freely and so naturally together, interested in a traditional and
+national sport, which is alike open to rich and poor, and meeting,
+not for the single occasion only, but several times a week, winter
+after winter, often for many years. Noblemen, gentlemen, farmers,
+manufacturers, professional men, snobs, cads, errand-boys,--everybody,
+in short, who cared to come seemed to have the right to come, and, so
+far as the hunt was concerned, seemed to be on an equal footing. Of
+course the poorer element was comparatively small, and mainly from the
+immediate neighborhood. The _habitues_ of a hunt are seldom below the
+grade of well-to-do farmers. Servants from the house were distributing
+refreshments, riders were mounting their hunters, grooms were adjusting
+saddle-girths, too fiery animals were being quieted, and there was
+generally an air of preparation about the whole assemblage.
+
+A little at one side, kept well together by the huntsman and a couple
+of whippers-in, were the hounds (the Atherstone pack), about forty of
+them, or, technically, "twenty couples," strong-limbed, large-eared,
+party-colored, wholesome-looking fellows. They attracted much attention
+and elicited frequent commendation, for they were said to be the very
+finest pack in England,--as was also each of the three other packs that
+I saw. To the unskilled eye, and simply viewed as dogs, they were not
+remarkable; but it was a case in which the judgment of an unskilled
+person could have no value.
+
+The horses appealed to me much more strongly. Certainly I had never
+before seen together the same number of the same average excellence;
+and some of them were fit to drive one wild with envy. There was, on
+the whole, less of the "blood" look than would be expected by a man who
+had got his ideas of the hunting-field from Leech's drawings, but there
+was a good deal of it, nevertheless, and in its perfection too; and
+where it was wanting there was plenty of bone to make up for it.
+
+At eleven the hounds were led out to the cover, and the whole field
+followed slowly and irregularly and at some distance. There were about
+one hundred and fifty mounted for the hunt. Perhaps one third of these
+wore scarlet coats, white breeches, and top-boots; another third had
+black coats and some of them black boots; and the remainder of the
+field was made up of half a dozen ladies, a few stout old gentlemen of
+seventy or so on stout old cobs of discreet age, little boys on smart
+ponies, farmers and tradesmen and their clerks mounted on whatever they
+could get, and men of every intermediate grade, and with all sorts of
+horses. A certain amount of riff-raff, not mounted at all, but good
+on their pins and ready for a run, were hanging about for a chance to
+pick up a whip or a hat, or to catch a horse, or brush a muddy coat, or
+turn an honest shilling in any way that might offer in the chances of
+the day. Some of these fellows, rigged out with the cast-off clothing
+of their betters, sported red coats, black velvet caps, and leather
+leggings. One added to all this gorgeousness the refinement of bare
+feet.
+
+The hounds were taken into the cover, a brambly, tangled wood near by,
+which had probably been planted and made a little wilderness to serve
+as a cover for foxes.
+
+They soon found a fox, drove him to the open, and followed him out of
+the wood with a whimpering sort of cry which was disappointing after
+the notion that the "full cry" of the books had given, and which is
+heard in the very different fox-hunting of our Southern woods. The run
+lay up a steepish hill, several fields wide and across an open country.
+One bold rider (not a light one), mounted on a staving black horse,
+went to the right of the cover, and made a splendid leap up hill,
+over a stiff-looking hedge, and landed at the tail of the pack. The
+"master" and his assistants had got away with the hounds. The rest of
+the field went to the left, waiting their turns, through a farm-gate.
+Once through, some twenty of them dashed up the hill, cleared a clever
+hedge, and kept the pack in sight. The rest took an easier place,
+where a farm laborer had pulled away the stakes by which a gap had
+been filled. Here there was much very light jumping, and much more of
+waiting until predecessors had made it lighter. In the mean time other
+gaps were found, and it was not many minutes before all were through;
+but during these minutes the fox, the hounds, and the harder riding men
+were putting a wide space between themselves and us, who were at the
+tail of the field. Yet there were some in the party who did not look
+like laggards, and whose horses were good enough for any work such a
+country could give them.
+
+Even when across the gap, these men went with the rest of us, by
+gates and lanes, toward a point to which it was thought by the knowing
+ones that the fox would double,--and the knowing ones were right.
+Gradually, as their judgment indicated, they left the roads and took to
+the fields. This course was taken by three well-mounted young ladies.
+I followed the gate-openers for about half an hour, when, coming out
+on a high-road, I concluded that, with seventeen miles to ride home,
+it was only just to my little mare to give the thing up and head for
+Leamington. The hounds were far away on my right and quite out of sight.
+
+Having come to look on and learn, I had probably seen and heard all
+that day had in store for me,--surely enough for one's first day at
+fox-hunting. When I had ridden for a few minutes I saw, far across
+the fields, that the hounds had turned to the left and were making
+for my road. Pressing forward, I came up in time to see them cross to
+the front, and go scurrying away over the grass, nosing out the scent
+as they ran. There had been a check, and "the field" was well up. The
+road was lower than the fields, and was bordered by a ditch at each
+side. From this the ground rose a little, and on each bank stood a
+three-and-a-half-foot thorn hedge. Neither leap was difficult, but the
+one out of the road was not easy. Here I sat and saw fully a hundred
+horsemen, dressed in the gay colors of the hunting-field and mounted
+as men rarely are mounted out of England, all, horses as well as men,
+eager and excited in the chase, flying over hedge and ditch into the
+carriage-way and over ditch and hedge into the higher field, beyond
+and away, headlong after the hounds, every man for himself, and every
+man for the front, and on they went over another hedge, and out of
+sight. In the thick of the flight were two ladies, riding as well and
+as boldly as the men, and two men were brushing their hats in the road,
+their empty saddles keeping well up with the run. More than satisfied
+with this climax of my first day's experience, I trotted out for home.
+The result of the run I never heard, and I leave its description where
+I lost sight of it. A mile farther on I did see a fagged-looking fox
+making his rapid way across my road again, and sneaking off under the
+hedge toward a thicket, and I halted to listen to what sounded like the
+horn of a huntsman at check over the hill to the left; but possibly the
+conclusion I drew was not a correct one.
+
+I wish that words could give an idea of the life and action of the
+headlong flight I had just seen; but the inadequacy of all I had read
+to convey it to me makes it seem useless to try. Photography and
+description may, in a measure, supply the place of travel; but he who
+would realize the most thrilling intensity of eager horsemanship must
+stand in a hedge-bound English lane, and see with his own eyes, and
+for the first time in his life, a hundred gayly dressed and splendidly
+mounted fox-hunters flashing at full speed across his path; and it is
+worth the while to see.
+
+Rain never fell on a more lovely country than that part of Warwickshire
+through which my wet way lay. For ten miles of the seventeen it rained,
+gently as it rains with us in April; nor is our grass more green in
+April than this was in Christmas week. The all-prevailing ivy was
+filled with berries, and the laurustinus was already in bloom.
+
+No born Englishman could have cared less for the soaking rain; and,
+wet to the skin, tired to the bone, and stiff to the marrow, I have
+rarely been more exuberant than when I gradually regained the use of my
+legs in the half-mile walk to the hotel, resolving that not even the
+glories of American citizenship should ever keep me away from England
+in winter were I only able to afford the luxury of regular hunting. But
+the exuberance was moral rather than physical. I had not been so tired
+for years,--stiff as an old horse, after over thirty miles of really
+hard riding (the last seventeen miles in two hours). The cure was a
+hot bath and a dish of hot soup, followed by a log-like sleep of two
+hours on a sofa before a blazing hot fire, a sharp half-hour's walk,
+a very plain dinner, and a couple of hours' chat with my interested
+East-Indiaman in the smoking-room: the cure was complete; and all that
+was left of the day's sport was its brilliant recollection.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+My second day was near Stratford-on-Avon,--on _Ay_-von, the misguided
+English call it. The meet was to be at Goldicote House, one of the
+"fixtures" of the Warwickshire Hunt. There were about a hundred
+persons, including a few ladies, and one little bareheaded "blue-coat"
+school-boy (from Charles Lamb's school), who, with his folded umbrella,
+long skirt, low shoes, and yellow hose, was in for as much sport as
+his Christmas holiday could give him. As a farther penalty for want of
+forethought, I was reduced to riding a friend's coach-horse. However,
+the reduction was not great, for whether by early instruction or by
+inheritance, he was more than half a hunter, and gave me a capital
+look at the whole day's chase; while his owner, on a most charming
+black blood mare, being out of condition for hard riding, kindly
+applied himself to urging me to severer work than one likes to do
+with a borrowed horse. He introduced me to a venerable old gentleman
+in a time-and-weather-stained red coat, velvet cap, and well-used
+nether gear, mounted on a knowing-looking old gray, and attended by
+his granddaughter. He could not have been less than eighty years old,
+and his days of hard riding were over; but constant hunting exercise
+every winter for over sixty years had protected him wonderfully well
+against the ravages of time, and it is rare to see an American of
+sixty so hale and hearty, and so cheerful and jolly. I was told that
+if I would take him for my leader, I would see more of the run than I
+could in any other way with such a mount as I had. He seemed to know
+the habits of the foxes of South Warwickshire as thoroughly as he did
+every foot-path and gate of the country, and he led us by cross-cuts to
+the various points to which Reynard circled, so that we often had the
+whole field in sight. It was not an especially interesting day, and the
+fox got away at last, among a tangle of railway lines that blocked our
+passage. My old mentor, who had given me much valuable instruction in
+the details of hunting, was vastly disgusted at the result, and broke
+out with, "Ah! it's all up with old England, I doubt; these confounded
+railways have killed sport. There's no hunting to be had any longer,
+for their infernal cutting up the country in this way. I've hunted with
+these hounds under fifteen different masters, but I've about done, and
+I sha'n't lose much,--it's all up. However, I suppose we could never
+pay the interest on the national debt without the railways; but it's
+all up with hunting." At that, he called away the young lady, bade me
+a melancholy "good-by," and rode half sadly home. I galloped back to
+Stratford with my handsome old host,--a little more knowing in the ways
+of the field, but without yet having had a fair taste of the sport.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Seven miles from Peterborough, in the dismal little village of
+Wansford, near the borders of Northamptonshire and Huntingdonshire, is,
+perhaps, the only remaining old posting-inn in England that is kept up
+in the unchanged style of the ante-railroad days. The post-horses are
+gone, but the posting-stables are filled with hunters; the travelling
+public have fled to the swifter lines, and Wansford is forever deserted
+of them; but the old Haycock keeps up its old cheer, and Tom Percival,
+who boasts that he has had the Princess Victoria for a guest, and has
+slept five dukes in one night, has little occasion to complain of
+neglect. The good wine that needs no bush still makes his cellar known,
+and no one should criticise English cooking until he has dined once at
+the Haycock. Nowhere is the inn-maid of whom we have read so much to be
+found in such simple, tidy, and courtesying perfection; and nowhere, in
+short, can one find so completely the solid comfort of hostelry life.
+Half old farm-house and half wayside-inn; with a marvellous larder,
+through whose glass-closed side the guest sees visions of joints and
+jams and pastry in lavish profusion; backed by a stable-yard where boys
+are always exercising good horses; and flanked by a yardful of quaint
+clipped yews,--the old house at Wansford (in spite of its dull-looking
+road front) is worth a visit from those who would get out of the sight
+and sound of steam, and see the old, old country life of England.
+The visitor is not numbered and billeted and pigeon-holed, as in the
+modern hotel; but the old fiction of host and guest is well kept up.
+Your coming should be announced in advance; and you are received as
+in some sort a member of the family, whose ways are made to conform
+more or less to the wishes of yourself and your convives, mainly young
+swells from London, who are few, and who are there, as you are, not for
+business, but for rest, good living, and regular sport. Three packs
+of hounds are within reach; and on the days when none of the meets is
+near, there is always the "larking"--the training of young horses--to
+supply a good substitute, so far as the riding goes. One who cares for
+hunting pure and simple, rather than for the gayer life of Leamington
+and Cheltenham, cannot do better than to make the season, or a part of
+it, at the Haycock, with regularly engaged horses for as many days in
+the week as he may choose to ride. It costs,--but it pays. One is none
+the less welcome among the guests for being an American.
+
+I there had a day with the George Fitz William hounds. Not being, as
+yet, quite at home in the field, I took a wise old horse, "Cock Robin,"
+who was well up to my weight, and who, as Percival told me, would
+teach me more than I could teach him. He was sent on early with the
+other hunters, and I took a "hack" to ride to cover. We were a party
+of four, and we went through the fields and the lawns and the rain,
+to where the meet was fixed for eleven o'clock, at Barnwell Castle, a
+fine old Norman ruin,--square and low, with four large corner towers
+draped in magnificent ivy. It was a dreary morning, and not more than
+sixty were out; but among these, as always, there were ladies, and
+there was more than the usual proportion of fine horses. One cover
+was drawn blank, and we moved to another, where a fox was found, and
+whence the run was sharp and too straight for a prudent novice to see
+very much of it; and it was some minutes before Cock Robin and his
+rider came up with the hounds, who had come to a check in a large wood.
+Throughout the day there was a good deal of waiting about different
+covers, between which the fox ran back and forth. Finally he broke away
+for a long, quick burst over the fields, which lay to the left of a
+farm-road down which we were riding, and which was flanked by a high
+and solid-looking hedge. Near the head of the party was a well-mounted
+blonde of seventeen, who had hitherto seemed to avoid the open country
+and to keep prudently near to her mother and her groom. The sight of
+the splendid run, fast leaving us behind, was too much for her, and she
+turned straight for the hedge, clearing it with a grander leap than I
+had seen taken that day, and flying on over hedges and ditches in the
+direct wake of the hounds. A young German who followed her said, as
+we rode back to the Haycock, "It is vort to come from America or from
+Owstria to see zat lofely Lady ---- go over ze cowntry"; and it was.
+
+Luck often favors the timid; Cock Robin and I were quite alone--he
+disgusted, and I half ashamed with my prudence--when the fox, who had
+found straight running of no avail, came swerving to the right over
+the crest of a distant hill, closely followed by the hounds, and, in
+splendid style, by the first flight of the field. Soon he crossed a
+brook which was fenced in with rails, and the horsemen all had to make
+a long detour, so that I, who had been last, now became first. I had
+the fox and the hounds all to myself; my horse was fresh, and the way
+was easy. My monopoly lasted only a moment, but it was not a moment of
+tranquillity. Finding an open gate and bridge, I followed the pack into
+a large low field, surrounded on three sides by the wide brook. The fox
+was turned by this and ran to the right along the bank; at the corner
+of the field he turned again to the right, still keeping by the edge of
+the stream; this gave the hounds an immense advantage, and cutting off
+the angle, they came so closely upon him that with still another turn
+of the brook ahead of him, he had but one chance for his life, and that
+was a desperate one for a tired fox to consider. He did not consider,
+but went slap at the brook, and cleared it with a leap of nearly twenty
+feet. The foremost hounds whimpered for a moment on the bank before
+they took to the water, and when they were across Reynard was well out
+of sight, and they had to nose out his trail afresh. He brought them
+again to a check, and finally, after half an hour's skirmishing, he ran
+down a railway cutting in the wake of a train, and got away.
+
+Incidentally, here was an opportunity for an English gentleman to show
+more good temper and breeding than it is one's daily lot to see. He was
+one of a bridgeful of horsemen watching the hounds as they vainly tried
+to unravel the fox's scent from the bituminous trail of the locomotive,
+when, full of eager curiosity, one of the ladies, middle-aged and not
+"native and to the manner born," but not an American, rode directly
+on to his horse's heels. To the confusion of my lady, the horse, like
+a sensible horse as he was, resented the attack with both his feet.
+His rider got him at once out of the way, and then returned, bowing
+his venerable head in regretful apology, and trusting that no serious
+harm had been done. "How can you ride such a kicking brute!" was the
+gracious acknowledgment of his forbearance.
+
+In this storied little island one is never for long out of the presence
+of places on the traditions of which our life-long fancies have been
+fed. Our road home lay past the indistinct mass of rubbish, clustered
+round with ivy and with the saddest associations, which was once
+Fotheringay Castle; and as we turned into the village my companions
+pointed out the still serviceable but long-unused "stocks" where the
+minor malefactors of the olden time expiated their offences.
+
+We reached the Haycock at three, a moist but far from unpleasant body
+of tired and dirty men, having ridden, since nine in the morning, over
+fifty-five miles, mostly in the rain, and often in a shower of mud
+splashed by galloping hoofs. By six o'clock we were in good trim for
+dinner, and after dinner for a long, cosey talk over the events of the
+day, and horses and fox-hunting in general. My own interest in the
+sport is confined mainly to its equestrian side, and I am not able to
+give much information as to its details. Any stranger must be impressed
+with the firm hold it has on the affections of the people, and with the
+little public sympathy that is shown for the rare attempts that are
+made to restrict its rights.
+
+It would seem natural that the farmers should be its bitter
+opponents. It can hardly be a cheerful sight, in March, for a thrifty
+man to see a crowd of mad horsemen tearing through his twenty acres of
+well-wintered wheat, filling the air with a spray of soil and uprooted
+plants. But let a non-riding reformer get up after the annual dinner
+of the local Agricultural Association and suggest that the rights of
+tenant-farmers have long enough lain at the mercy of their landlord and
+his fox-hunting friends, with the rabble of idle sports and ruthless
+ne'er-do-weels who follow at their heels, and that it is time for them
+to assert themselves and try to secure the prohibition of a costly
+pastime, which leads to no good practical result, and the burdens of
+which fall so heavily on the producing classes,--and then see how his
+brother farmers will second his efforts. The very man whose wheat was
+apparently ruined will tell him that in March one would have said the
+whole crop was destroyed, but that the stirring up seemed to do it
+good, for he had never before seen such an even stand on that field.
+Another will argue that while hunting does give him some extra work in
+the repair of hedges and gates, and while he sometimes has his fields
+torn up more than he likes, yet the hounds are the best neighbors he
+has; they bring a good market for hay and oats, and, for his part, he
+likes to get a day with them himself now and then. Another raises a
+young horse when he can, and if he turns out a clever fencer, he gets a
+much larger price for him than he could if there were no hunting in the
+country. Another has now and then lost poultry by the depredations of
+foxes, but he never knew the master to refuse a fair claim for damages;
+for his part, he would scorn to ask compensation; he likes to see the
+noble sport, which is the glory of England, flourishing, in spite of
+modern improvements. At this point, and at this stage of the convivial
+cheer, they bring in the charge at Balaklava, and other evidences that
+the noble sport, which is the glory of old England, breeds a race of
+men whose invincible daring always has won and always shall win her
+honor in the field;--and Long live the Queen, and Here's a health to
+the Handley Cross Hunt, and Confusion to the mean and niggardly spirit
+that is filling the country with wire fences and that would do away
+with the noble sport which is the glory of old England! Hear! hear!!
+And so it ends, and half the company, in velvet caps, scarlet coats,
+leathers and top-boots, will be early on the ground at the first meet
+of the next autumn, glad to see their old cover-side friends once more,
+and hoping for a jolly winter of such healthful amusements and pleasant
+intercourse as shall put into their heads and their hearts and into
+their hearty frames and ruddy faces a tenfold compensation for the
+trifling loss they may sustain in the way of broken gates and trampled
+fields.
+
+I saw too little to be able to form a fair opinion as to the harm
+done; but when once the run commences no more account is made of wheat,
+which is carefully avoided when going at a slow pace, than if it were
+so much sawdust; fences are torn down, and there is no time to replace
+them; if gates are locked, they are taken off the hinges or broken; if
+sheep join the crowd in an enclosure and follow them into the road, no
+one stops to see that they are returned: we are after the hounds, and
+sheep must take care of themselves. I saw one farmer, in an excited
+manner, open the gates of his kitchen-garden and turn the hounds and
+twenty horsemen through it as the shortest way to where he had seen the
+fox go; his womenfolk eagerly calling "Tally-ho!" to others who were
+going wrong. I have never seen a railroad train stopped because of the
+conductor's interest in a passing hunt, but I fancy that is the only
+thing in England that does not stop when the all-absorbing interest is
+once awakened.
+
+Whatever may be the effect on material interests, the benefit of this
+eager, vigorous, outdoor life on the health and morals of the people
+is most unmistakable. Such a race of handsome, hale, straight-limbed,
+honest, and simple-hearted men can nowhere else be found as in the wide
+class that passes as much of every winter as is possible in regular
+fox-hunting; and to make an application of their example, we could well
+afford to give over many of our fertile fields to ruthless destruction,
+and many of our fertile hours to the most senseless sport, if it would
+only replace our dyspeptic stomachs, sallow cheeks, stooping shoulders,
+and restless eagerness with the hale and hearty and easy-going life
+and energy of our English cousins. Hardly enough women hunt in England
+to constitute an example; but those who do are such models of health
+and freshness as to make one wish that more women had the benefit of
+such amusement both there and here. It is very common to see men of
+over sixty following the hounds in the very _elite_ of the field; they
+seem still in the vigor of youth. At seventy many are yet regular at
+their work; and it is hardly remarkable when one finally hangs up his
+red coat only at the age of eighty. Considering all this, it almost
+becomes a question whether, patriotism to the contrary notwithstanding,
+it would not be a good thing for a prosperous American, instead of
+settling down at the age of forty-five to a special partnership and a
+painful digestion, to take a smaller income where it would bring more
+comfort, and by a judicious application of the pig-skin to rehabilitate
+his enfeebled alimentation.
+
+Fox-hunting is a costly luxury if one goes well mounted and well
+appointed. It can hardly be made cheap, even when one lives in his
+own house and rides his own horses. With hotel bills and horse-hire,
+it costs still more. As an occasional indulgence it is always a good
+investment. My own score at the Haycock was as follows,--by way of
+illustration, and because actual figures are worth more than estimates.
+(I was there from Thursday afternoon until Sunday morning, went out
+with a shooting-party on Friday, dined out on Friday night, and hunted
+on Saturday.)
+
+                       THE HAYCOCK INN.
+
+                                          L  _s._ _d._
+  Jan. 2.  Dinner and wine,                   10   6
+           Bed and fire,                       3   6
+   "   3.  Breakfast,                          2   6
+           Apartments,[A] bed and fire,        5   0
+           Attendance,[B]                      1   6
+  Jan. 4.  Breakfast,                          2   6
+           Dinner and wine,                   10   6
+           Apartments, bed and fire,           5   6
+           Attendance,                         1   6
+   "   5.  Breakfast,                          2   6
+
+                           STABLE.
+
+           Conveying luggage from station,     2   6
+           Dog-cart to Sharks Lodge,          10   6
+            "   "    " Oundle,                12   6
+            "   "    " Peterborough,           8   0
+
+                       THOMAS PERCIVAL.
+
+  Jan. 4. Hire of hunter to Barnwell,     4    4   0
+            "     hack    "     "             10   6
+
+[A] The run of the house.
+
+[B] We are apt to consider this a petty swindle, but it has the
+advantage that you get what you pay for.
+
+Eight pounds, twelve shillings, and sixpence; which being interpreted
+means $47.30 in the lawful currency of the United States. The hunter
+and hack for one day cost $23.52.
+
+An American friend living with his family in Leamington (much more
+cheaply than he could live at home), kept two hunters and a hack, and
+hunted them twice a week for the whole season (nearly six months) at a
+cost, including the loss on his horses, which he sold in the spring, of
+less than $1,500. I think this is below the average expense.
+
+The cost of keeping up a pack of hounds is very heavy. The hounds
+themselves, a well-paid huntsman, two or three whippers-in, two
+horses a day for each of these attendants (hunting four days a week,
+this would probably require four horses for each man), and no end of
+incidental expenses, bring the cost to fully $20,000 per annum. This is
+sometimes paid wholly or in part by subscription and sometimes entirely
+by the Master of the Hounds. One item of my friend's expenses at
+Leamington was a subscription of ten guineas each to the Warwickshire,
+North Warwickshire, Atherstone, and Pytchley hunts. Something of this
+sort would be necessary if one hunted for any considerable time with
+any subscription pack, but an occasional visitor is not expected to
+contribute.
+
+A stranger participating in the sport need only be guided by common
+modesty and common-sense. However good a horseman he may be, he cannot
+make a sensation among the old stagers of the hunting-field. Probably
+he will get no commendation of any sort. If he does, it will be for
+keeping out of the way of others,--taking always the easiest and safest
+road that will bring him well up with the hounds, not flinching when a
+desperate leap must be taken, and following (at a respectful distance)
+a good leader, rather than trying to take the lead himself. However
+promising the prospect may be, he had better not do anything on his own
+hook; if he makes a conspicuous mistake, he will probably be corrected
+for it in plainer English than it is pleasant to hear.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+One of the memorable days of my life was the day before New-Year's.
+Ford had secured me a capital hunter, a well-clipped gelding, over
+sixteen hands high, glossy, lean, and wiry as a racer. "You've got
+a rare mount to-day, sir," said the groom as he held him for me to
+get up; and a rare dismount I came near having in the little measure
+of capacity with which Master Dick and I commenced our acquaintance,
+before we left the Regent. He was one of those horses whose spirits
+are just a little too much for their skins, and all the way out he
+kept up a restless questioning of his prospect of having his own way.
+Still he was in all this, as in his manner of doing his work when he
+got into the open country, such a perfect counterpart of old Max, who
+had carried me for two years in the Southwest, that I was at home at
+once. If I had had a hunter made to order, I could not have been more
+perfectly suited.
+
+The meet (North Warwickshire) was at Cubbington Gate, only two miles
+from Leamington, and a very gay meet it was. The road was filled with
+carriages, and there was a goodly rabble on foot. About three hundred,
+in every variety of dress, were mounted for the hunt, a dozen or so
+of ladies among them. Three of these kept well up all day, and one of
+them rode very straight. The hounds were taken to a wood about a mile
+to the eastward of Cubbington, where they soon found a fox, which led
+us a very straight course to Princethorpe, about three miles to the
+northeast.
+
+I had done little fencing for seven or eight years, and the sort
+of propulsion one gets in being carried over a hedge is sufficiently
+different from the ordinary impulses of civil life to suggest at first
+the element of surprise. Consequently, though our initial leap was a
+modest one, I landed with only one foot in the stirrup and with one
+hand in the mane; but I now saw that Dick was but another name for Max,
+and this one moderate failure was enough to recall the old tricks of
+the craft. As the opportunity would perhaps never come again, this one
+was not to be neglected, and I resolved to have one fair inside view
+of real fox-hunting. Dick was clearly as good a horse as was out that
+day; the leaping was less than that to which we were used among the
+worm-fences, fallen timber, and gullies of Arkansas and Tennessee; and
+there was but a plain Anglo-Saxon name for the only motive that could
+deter me from making the most of the occasion. Mr. Lant, the Master of
+the Hounds, was not better mounted for his lighter weight than was I
+for my fourteen stone; and his position as well as his look indicated
+that he would probably go by the nearest practicable route to where the
+fox might lead, so we kept at a safe distance behind him and well in
+his wake. The hesitation and uncertainty which had at first confused my
+bridle-hand being removed, my horse, recognizing the changed position
+of affairs, settled down to his work like a well-trained and sensible
+but eager beast as he was. From the covert to Princethorpe we took
+seven fences and some small ditches, and we got there with the first
+half-dozen of the field, both of us in higher spirits than horse and
+rider ever get except by dint of hard going and successful fencing.
+
+Here there was a short check, but the fox was soon routed out again and
+made for Waveley Wood, a couple of miles to the northwest.
+
+Waveley Wood is what is called in England a "biggish bit of timber,"
+and the check here was long enough to allow the whole field to come up.
+As we sat chatting and lighting our cigars, "Tally-ho!" was called from
+the other side of the cover, and we splashed through a muddy cart-road
+and out into the open just as the hounds were well away. Now was a ride
+for dear life. Every one had on all the speed the heavy ground would
+allow. In front of us was a "bullfinch" (a neglected hedge, out of
+which strong thorny shoots of several years' growth have run up ten or
+twelve feet above it). I had often heard of bullfinches, and no hunting
+experience could be complete without taking one. It was some distance
+around by the gate, the pace was strong, and the spiny fringe had just
+closed behind Mr. Lant's red coat as he dropped into the field beyond.
+"Follow my leader" is a game that must be boldly played; so, settling
+my hat well down, holding my bridle-hand low, and covering my closed
+eyes with my right elbow, with the whip-hand over the left shoulder, I
+put my heart in my pocket and went at it, and through it with a crash!
+An ugly scratch on the fleshy part of the right hand was the only
+damage done, and I was one of the very few near the pack. Dick and I
+were now up to anything; we made very light of a thick tall hedge that
+came next in order, and we cleared it like a bird; but we landed in a
+pool of standing water, covering deeply ploughed ground, the horse's
+forefeet sinking so deeply that he could not get them out in time, and
+our headway rolled us both over in the mud, I flat on my back. Dick
+got up just in time for his pastern to strike me in the face as I was
+rising, giving me a cut lip, a mouthful of blood, and a black and blue
+nose-bridge. My appearance has, on occasions, been more respectable
+and my temper more serene than as I ran, soiled and bleeding, over the
+ploughed ground, calling to some workmen to "catch my horse."
+
+I was soon up and away again. There seemed some confusion in the run,
+and the master being out of sight, I followed one of the whips as he
+struck into a blind path in a wood. It was a tangled mass of briers,
+but he went in at full pace, and evidently there was no time to be
+lost. At the other side of the copse there was a set of low bars, and
+beyond this a small, slimy ditch. My leader cleared the bars, but
+his horse's hind feet slipped on the bank of the ditch, and he fell
+backwards with an ugly kind of sprawl that I had no time to examine,
+for Dick took the leap easily and soon brought me into a field where,
+on a little hillock, and quite alone, stood the huntsman, dismounted,
+holding the dead fox high in his left hand, while with his long-leashed
+hunting-crop he kept the hungry and howling pack at bay. The master
+soon came up, as did about a dozen others, including a bright little
+boy on a light little pony. The fox's head (mask), tail (brush), and
+feet (pads) were now cut off and distributed as trophies under the
+master's direction. The carcass was then thrown to the pack, that
+fought and snarled over it until, in a twinkling, the last morsel had
+disappeared. This was the "death,"--by no means the most engaging part
+of the amusement. From the find to the killing was only twenty-five
+minutes, into which had been crowded more excitement and more physical
+happiness than I had known for many a long day.
+
+The second cover drawn was not far away. With this fox we had two
+hours' work, mainly through woods at a walk and with the hounds
+frequently at fault, but with some good leaping. Finally he was run to
+earth and abandoned.
+
+We then went to a cover near Bubbenhall, but found no fox, and then,
+with the same luck, to another east of Baggington. It was now nearly
+four o'clock, growing dusk, and beginning to rain. The hounds started
+for their kennels, and Dick and I took a soft bridle-path skirting the
+charming road that leads, under such ivy-clad tree-trunks and between
+such hedges as no other land can show, through Stoneleigh Village and
+past Stoneleigh Abbey to Leamington, and a well-earned rest.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+My memorandum for that day closes: "Horse, L2 12_s._ 6_d._; Fees,
+2_s._; and well worth the money."
+
+
+THE END.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Whip and Spur, by George E. Waring
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