Our company was gaining in number as it moved onwards. We had found upon
the train from New York a lovely, lonely lady, the wife of one of our
most spirited Massachusetts officers, the brave Colonel of the __th
Regiment, going to seek her wounded husband at Middletown, a place lying
directly in our track. She was the light of our party while we were
together on our pilgrimage, a fair, gracious woman, gentle, but
courageous,

---"ful plesant and amiable of port,
---estatelich of manere,
And to ben holden digne of reverence."

On the road from Philadelphia, I found in the same car with our party Dr.
William Hunt of Philadelphia, who had most kindly and faithfully attended
the Captain, then the Lieutenant, after a wound received at Ball's Bluff,
which came very near being mortal. He was going upon an errand of mercy
to the wounded, and found he had in his memorandum-book the name of our
lady's husband, the Colonel, who had been commended to his particular
attention.

Not long after leaving Philadelphia, we passed a solitary sentry keeping
guard over a short railroad bridge. It was the first evidence that we
were approaching the perilous borders, the marches where the North and
the South mingle their angry hosts, where the extremes of our so-called
civilization meet in conflict, and the fierce slave-driver of the Lower
Mississippi stares into the stern eyes of the forest-feller from the
banks of the Aroostook. All the way along, the bridges were guarded more
or less strongly. In a vast country like ours, communications play a far
more complex part than in Europe, where the whole territory available for
strategic purposes is so comparatively limited. Belgium, for instance,