And, by the way, during those halcyon days (the halcyon was there, too, chattering above every creek, as he is all over the world) we fought another battle.  It has not got into history, but it had a real objective existence although by a felicitous afterthought called by us who were defeated a “reconnaissance in force.”  Its short and simple annals are hat we marched a long way and lay down before a fortified camp of the enemy at the farther edge of a valley.  Our commander had the forethought to see that we lay well out of range of the small-arms of the period.  A disadvantage of this arrangement was that the enemy was out of reach of us as well, for our rifles were no better than his.  Unfortunately—­one might almost say unfairly—­he had a few pieces of artillery very well protected, and with those he mauled us to the eminent satisfaction of his mind and heart.  So we parted from him in anger and returned to our own place, leaving our dead—­not many.

Among them was a chap belonging to my company, named Abbott; it is not odd that I recollect it, for there was something unusual in the manner of Abbott’s taking off.  He was lying flat upon his stomach and was killed by being struck in the side by a nearly spent cannon-shot that came rolling in among us.  The shot remained in him until removed.  It was a solid round-shot, evidently cast in some private foundry, whose proprietor, setting the laws of thrift above those of ballistics, had put his “imprint” upon it:  it bore, in slightly sunken letters, the name “Abbott.”  That is what I was told—­I was not present.

It was after this, when the nights had acquired a trick of biting and the morning sun appeared to shiver with cold, that we moved up to the summit of Cheat Mountain to guard the pass through which nobody wanted to go.  Here we slew the forest and builded us giant habitations (astride the road from Nowhere to the southeast) commodious to lodge an army and fitly loopholed for discomfiture of the adversary.  The long logs that it was our pride to cut and carry!  The accuracy with which we laid them one upon another, hewn to the line and bullet-proof!  The Cyclopean doors that we hung, with sliding bolts fit to be “the mast of some great admiral”!  And when we had “made the pile complete” some marplot of the Regular Army came that way and chatted a few moments with our commander, and we made an earthwork away off on one side of the road (leaving the other side to take care of itself) and camped outside it in tents!  But the Regular Army fellow had not the heart to suggest the demolition of our Towers of Babel, and the foundations remain to this day to attest the genius of the American volunteer soldiery.

We were the original game-preservers of the Cheat Mountain region, for although we hunted in season and out of season over as wide an area as we dared to cover we took less game, probably, than would have been taken by a certain single hunter of disloyal views whom we scared away.  There were bear galore and deer in quantity, and many a winter day, in snow up to his knees, did the writer of this pass in tracking bruin to his den, where, I am bound to say, I commonly left him.  I agreed with my lamented friend, the late Robert Weeks, poet: