on the left, but still hung heavily down the south on the heels of the
flying cavalry. A long bugle call swelled up musically from below. The
freed sun caught the white flags of two field hospitals in the woods
and glanced tranquilly on the broad, cypress-fringed, lazy-flowing,
and cruel but beautiful Southern river, which had all unseen crept so
smilingly that morning through the very heart of the battle.


CHAPTER I.


The two o'clock express from Redlands to Forestville, Georgia, had
been proceeding with the languid placidity of the river whose banks it
skirted for more than two hours. But, unlike the river, it had stopped
frequently; sometimes at recognized stations and villages, sometimes at
the apparition of straw-hatted and linen-coated natives in the solitude
of pine woods, where, after a decent interval of cheery conversation
with the conductor and engineer, it either took the stranger on board,
or relieved him of his parcel, letter, basket, or even the verbal
message with which he was charged. Much of the way lay through
pine-barren and swampy woods which had never been cleared or cultivated;
much through decayed settlements and ruined villages that had remained
unchanged since the War of the Rebellion, now three years past. There
were vestiges of the severity of a former military occupation; the
blackened timbers of railway bridges still unrepaired; and along the
line of a certain memorable march, sections of iron rails taken from
the torn-up track, roasted in bonfires and bent while red-hot around the
trunks of trees, were still to be seen. These mementos of defeat seemed
to excite neither revenge nor the energy to remove them; the dull apathy
which had succeeded the days of hysterical passion and convulsion still