II.


HOW I BECAME A MEMBER OF GENERAL STUART'S STAFF.


If the reader has done me the honor to peruse the first volume of my
memoirs, I indulge the vanity of supposing that he will like to be
informed how I became a member of General Stuart's staff.

When oaks crash down they are apt to prostrate the saplings growing
around them. Jackson was a very tall oak, and I a very humble sapling.
When the great trunk fell, the mere twig disappeared. I had served with
Jackson from the beginning of the war; that king of battle dead at
Chancellorsville, I had found myself without a commander, and without a
home. I was not only called upon in that May of 1863, to mourn the
illustrious soldier, who had done me the honor to call me his friend; I
had also to look around me for some other general; some other position
in the army.

I was revolving this important subject in my mind, when I received a
note from General J.E.B. Stuart, Jackson's friend and brother in arms.
"Come and see me," said this note. Forty-eight hours afterward I was at
Stuart's head-quarters, near Culpeper Court-House.

When I entered his tent, or rather breadth of canvas, stretched beneath
a great oak, Stuart rose from the red blanket upon which he was lying,