Returning from an enjoyable leave of absence, he found his command at Chambersburg, Pa.  Three days later he commanded the battalion at the bloody battle of Gettysburg.  Again Colonel Rice is absent on sick leave, and regains the army just as Longstreet was crossing the Holston.  Four days afterwards he was given one company from each of the five regiments to reinforce his battalion, and ordered to feel for and drive the enemy from the position which they held.  This proved to be a fortified camp and the enemy in strong line of battle.  In the engagement that followed, Colonel Rice was again so severely wounded as to render him unfit for service thereafter.

After this he returned home to the prosecution of his life-work, farming.  He removed to Abbeville, now Greenwood County, December, 1869, where he may now be found, as he says, “in the enjoyment of a reasonable degree of health and strength, surrounded by friends and relatives.”

* * * * *

JULIUS ZOBEL.

To show with what devotion and fidelity the private soldier of the Southland served the cause he espoused, I will relate as an example the act of Julius Zobel, who fell so dangerously wounded before Knoxville.  This is not an isolated case, for hundreds and thousands were tempted like Zobel, but turned away with scorn and contempt.  But Julius Zobel was an exception in that he was not a native born, but a blue-eyed, fair-haired son of the “Fatherland.”  He had not been in this “Land of the free and home of the brave” long enough to comprehend all its blessings, he being under twenty-one years of age, and not yet naturalized.  He was a mechanic in the railroad shops, near Newberry, when the first call for volunteers was made.  He laid aside his tools and promptly joined Company E (Captain Nance), of the Third South Carolina, called “Quitman Rifles.”

He had a smooth, pleasant face, a good eye, and the yellow hair of his countrymen.  His nature was all sunshine, geniality, and many a joke he practiced upon his comrades, taking all in good humor those passed upon him.  One day, as a comrade had been “indulging” too freely, another accosted him with—­

“Turn away your head, your breath is awful.  What is the matter with you?”

Zobel, in his broad German brogue, answered for his companion.  “Led ’em alone, dare been nodden to madder mid Mattis, only somding crawled in him and died.”

He lost his leg at Knoxville and fell in the enemy’s hands after Longstreet withdrew, and was sent North with the other wounded.  While in the loathsome prison pen, enduring all the sufferings, hardships, and horrors of the Federal “Bastile,” he was visited by the German Consul, and on learning that he had not been naturalized, the Consul offered him his liberty if he would take the oath of allegiance to the North.

Zobel flashed up as with a powder burst, and spoke like the true soldier that he was.  “What!  Desert my comrades; betray the country I have sworn to defend; leave the flag under whose folds I have lost all but life?  No, no!  Let me die a thousand deaths in this hell hole first!”