were met with were in places too sickening to admit of description.  The enemy’s dead, in many places, had been left unburied, it being a veritable instance of “leaving the dead to bury the dead.”  Horses in a rapid state of decomposition literally covered the field.  The air was so impregnated with the foul stench arising from the plains where the battle had raged fiercest, that the troops were forced to close their nostrils while passing.  Here and there lay a dead enemy overlooked in the night of the general burial, stripped of his outer clothing, his blackened features and glassy eyes staring upturned to the hot September sun, while our soldiers hurried past, leaving them unburied and unnoticed.  Some lay in the beaten track of our wagon trains, and had been run over ruthlessly by the teamsters, they not having the time, if the inclination, to remove them.  The hot sun made decomposition rapid, and the dead that had fallen on the steep incline their heads had left the body and rolled several paces away.  All the dead had become as black as Africans, the hot rays of the sun changing the features quite prematurely.  In the opening where the Washington Battalion of Artillery from New Orleans had played such havoc on the 30th with the enemy’s retreating columns, it resembled some great railroad wreck—­cannon and broken caissons piled in great heaps; horses lying swollen and stiff, some harnessed, others not; broken rammers, smashed wheels, dismounted pieces told of the desperate struggle that had taken place.  One of the strange features of a battlefield is the absence of the carrion crow or buzzard—­it matters little as to the number of dead soldiers or horses, no vultures ever venture near—­it being a fact that a buzzard was never seen in that part of Virginia during the war.

All was still, save the rumble of the wagon trains and the steady tread of the soldiers.  Across Bull Run and out towards Washington McLaws followed with hasty step the track of Longstreet and Jackson.

On the 5th or 6th we rejoined at last, after a two months’ separation from the other portion of the army.  Lee was now preparing to invade Maryland and other States North, as the course of events dictated.  Pope’s Army had joined that of McClellan, and the authorities at Washington had to call on the latter to “save their Capital.”  When the troops began the crossing of the now classic Potomac, a name on every tongue since the commencement of hostilities, their enthusiasm knew no bounds.  Bands played “Maryland, My Maryland,” men sang and cheered, hats filled the air, flags waved, and shouts from fifty thousand throats reverberated up and down the banks of the river, to be echoed back from the mountains and die away among the hills and highlands of Maryland.  Men stopped midway in the stream and sang loudly the cheering strains of Randall’s, “Maryland, My Maryland.”  We were overjoyed at rejoining the army, and the troops of Jackson, Longstreet, and the two Hills were proud to feel the elbow touch of