By two o’clock the Caribees were in the line that had been passing city-ward since daylight.  The sun had baked the sticky clay into brick-like hardness, and the hours of trampling, the tread of heavy teams, and the still heavier artillery, had filled the air with an opaque atmosphere of reddish powder, through which the masses passed in almost spectral vagueness.  The city crowds, usually alert, when great masses of men moved, were discouraged by heat and dust, and the streets were quite given over to the military.  Eager as Jack and his friends were to note the impression the march made upon the civilians, most of whom were thought to be secretly in sympathy with the rebellion, it was impossible to even catch sight of any but soldiers.  Pennsylvania Avenue, when they reached it, was a billowy channel of impalpable powder.  But at the Long Bridge the breeze from the wide channel of the river cleared the clouds of dust, and the men, catching glimpses of each other, broke into jocose banter.  On the bridge they looked eagerly down the river, where the low roofs of Alexandria were visible, and upward on the Virginia shore where the gleaming walls of Arlington recalled to Jack far different times and scenes.

“Now we’re in Jeff Davis’s land,” Barney called out from one of the rear files, as the company reached midway in the bridge.

“Not by a long shot,” Nick Marsh cried.  “Davis’s land begins and ends within cannon-shot of himself.  He is like the Duke of Saxe-Meiningen—­he has to beg his neighbor’s permission to hold battalion drill.”

“He isn’t so polite as the duke; he takes it without asking,” Barney retorts.

“But now we are on the ‘sacred soil,’” Jack cries, as the company debouched from the bridge up the steep, narrow road that seemed to be taking them to Arlington.  In spite of the burning heat and the exhaustion of the three hours’ march, the scene was, or rather the imagination of the men, invested each step with a sort of awe.  They were at last in the enemy’s territory.  It had been held by the Union forces, only by dint of large numbers and strong fortifications.  There wasn’t a man in the company that didn’t resent the fact, constantly obtruding itself on the ranks as they marched eagerly onward by every knoll, every bush in the landscape, that Union soldiers had been there before them! that their devouring eyes were not the first to mark these historic spots.

Tired as they were and burdensome as the heavy knapsacks and still heavier ammunition had become, they heard an aide give the order to bivouac with chagrin!  They so longed to put undebatable ground behind them and really be where the distant coppice might be a curtain to the enemy!  The Caribees marked with indignant surprise that, when they had turned into a field about seven o’clock, the long line following them pushed onward until far into the night, and they envied the contiguity this would give the lucky laggards to first see and engage the enemy!  But they turned-to very merrily, in this first night of real soldiering.  They were “in the field.”  All the parade part of military life was now relaxed.  The hot little dress coats were left behind; there was no display.  Even guard-mount was reduced to the simplest possible form.