O days when all the world was beautiful and strange; when unfamiliar constellations burned in the Southern midnights, and the mocking-bird poured out his heart in the moon-gilded magnolia; when there was something new under a new sun; will your fine, far memories ever cease to lay contrasting pictures athwart the harsher features of this later world, accentuating the ugliness of the longer and tamer life?  Is it not strange that the phantoms of a blood-stained period have so airy a grace and look with so tender eyes?—­that I recall with difficulty the danger and death and horrors of the time, and without effort all that was gracious and picturesque?  Ah, Youth, there is no such wizard as thou!  Give me but one touch of thine artist hand upon the dull canvas of the Present; gild for but one moment the drear and somber scenes of to-day, and I will willingly surrender an other life than the one that I should have thrown away at Shiloh.

A LITTLE OF CHICKAMAUGA

The history of that awful struggle is well known—­I have not the intention to record it here, but only to relate some part of what I saw of it; my purpose not instruction, but entertainment.

I was an officer of the staff of a Federal brigade.  Chickamauga was not my first battle by many, for although hardly more than a boy in years, I had served at the front from the beginning of the trouble, and had seen enough of war to give me a fair understanding of it.  We knew well enough that there was to be a fight:  the fact that we did not want one would have told us that, for Bragg always retired when we wanted to fight and fought when we most desired peace.  We had manoeuvred him out of Chattanooga, but had not manoeuvred our entire army into it, and he fell back so sullenly that those of us who followed, keeping him actually in sight, were a good deal more concerned about effecting a junction with the rest of our army than to push the pursuit.  By the time that Rosecrans had got his three scattered corps together we were a long way from Chattanooga, with our line of communication with it so exposed that Bragg turned to seize it.  Chickamauga was a fight for possession of a road.

Back along this road raced Crittenden’s corps, with those of Thomas and McCook, which had not before traversed it.  The whole army was moving by its left.

There was sharp fighting all along and all day, for the forest was so dense that the hostile lines came almost into contact before fighting was possible.  One instance was particularly horrible.  After some hours of close engagement my brigade, with foul pieces and exhausted cartridge boxes, was relieved and withdrawn to the road to protect several batteries of artillery—­probably two dozen pieces—­which commanded an open field in the rear of our line.  Before our weary and virtually disarmed men had actually reached the guns the line in front gave way, fell back