hoping that there at least I might discover some object on which my
gaze might settle, something that would relieve the intense nerve-
strain of the black nothingness. I swept with staring eyes the half
circle where I knew must lie the deep wide valley far beneath, but no
welcome gleam of light greeted me. Far out yonder, as I well knew, was
the cheery glow where our ragged, tired comrades rested around their
night fires, but the bend of the land between shut it all off as
completely as if I were already in another world, a denizen of those
cold and silent stars so far away.

I recall it now as one of the loneliest moments of my life, one of
those almost unaccountable conditions of mind and body when it seemed
to me that the thin, sinewy fingers of an inexorable fate were closing
down with a pressure which no strength of man might resist. I was worn
with fatigue in the saddle, but did not dream of sleep; my mind, in a
firm endeavor to cast aside the uncanny influences of the hour,
recalled in swift panorama those three years of civil strife which had
run their course since I, a slender, white-faced lad, had stolen forth
into the moonlight from the portals of the old home, to ride away into
the northward where the throbbing drums called me. In those days I
understood but little of the cause for which I was so eager to fight
and suffer. Possibly I cared even less; yet I had ever since blindly
followed the faded, tattered flag of my native State with the same
passionate devotion that possessed thousands of others, and with no
clearer thought than to remain beside it to the bitter end.

What strange, exciting years those had been; how filled with adventure!
Like pictures painted on a screen there flashed across my memory in
vivid colors the camps and marches, the long night vigils, the swift
sweep of the charging squadrons, the deadly shock of battle, the