in a wheel-track; yonder a fragment of harness; here lay a broken hame,
there was the half of a russet brogan and yonder a ragged sock stained
and bloody.

"Why, what does all this mean?" asked Miss Harper amid her nieces'
cries.

I said it meant Fisher's battery hurrying to the front. Twenty miles
since five that morning was a marvel, horse artillery though they were,
for, as I pointed out by many signs, their animals were in ill
condition. "We shall have to go round them by neighborhood roads," I
said, and presently we were deeper than ever in woodland shades and
sources of girlish wonderment. The humid depths showed every sort of
green and gray, their trunks, bushes and boughs, bearded with hanging
moss, robed with tangled vines and chapleted with mistletoe. We seemed
to have got this earth quite to ourselves and very much to our liking.

One o'clock. Miss Harper suggested a halt to feed the horses. I, knowing
what it would cost me to dismount and go walking about, said no, thrice
no; let us first get back upon the main road in front of that battery.
On, therefore, we hurried, and soon the reality of the war was vivid to
us again. In a stretch of wet road where the team had mutely begged
leave to walk and the ladies had urged me to sing we had at length
paused in a pebbly rivulet to allow the weary animals to drink, and the
girls and the aunt and the greenwood and I were all in chorus
bidding somebody

"Unloose the west port and let us go free,"

when, just as our last note died among the trees one of us cried,