“No,” say I drily.  “What did you take him for?” to her.  Then I get the answer before quoted.  But my companion, with a truer perception, went quietly up and kissed her Tennessee sister, a little to the surprise of both, I think, but they seemed touched by the silent little tribute more than by any words.

I have spoken of the character of the hostilities in that “debatable land.”  War is a bad thing always, but when it gets into a simple neighborhood, and teaches the right and duty of killing one’s friends and relatives, it becomes demoniac.  Down about Knoxville they practiced a better method.  There it was the old game of “Beggar your Neighbor,” and they denounced and “confiscated” each other industriously.  Up in the poor hills they could only kill and burn, and rob the stable and smoke-house.  We were shown the scene of one of these neighborhood vengeances.  It is a low house at the side of a ravine, down whose steep slope the beech forest steps persistently erect, as if distrusting gravitation.  Thirty Confederates had gathered in that house at a country-side frolic, and the fiddle sang deep in the night.  The mountain girls are very pretty, having dark, opalescent eyes, with a touch of gold in them at a side glance, slight, rather too fragile figures, and the singular purity of complexion peculiar to high lands.

The moon went down, and the music of the dance, the shuffle of feet on the puncheon floor, died away into that deep murmurous chant, the hymn of Nature in the forest.  The falling water, sleeping in the dam or toiling all day at the mill, gurgles like the tinkling of castanets.  Every vine and little leaf is a harp-string; every tiny blade of grass flutes its singly inaudible treble; the rustling leaves, chirping cricket, piping batrachian, the tuneful hum of insects that sleep by day and wake by night, mingle and flow in the general harmony of sound.  The reeds and weeds and trunks of trees, like the great and lesser pipes of an organ, thunder a low bass.  The melancholy hoot of the owl and the mellow complaint of the whippoorwill join in the solemn diapason of the forest, filling the solitudes with grand, stately marches.  There are no sounds of Nature or art so true in harmony as this ceaseless murmur of the American woods.  So accordant is it with the solemn majesty of form and color that the observer fails to separate and distinguish it as an isolated part in the grand order of Nature.  He has felt an indescribable awe in the presence of serene night and unbounded shadow, but to divide and distinguish its constituent causes were as vain as in the contour and color of a single tree to note the varied influence of rock, soil and river.

Over the little farm-house in the ravine in the fall of 1863 there fell with the sinking moon these solemn dirges of the great dark woods.  The stars brightened their crowns till Via Lactea shone a highway of silver dust or as the shadow of that primeval river rolling across the blue champaign of heaven.  The depths of repose that follow the enjoyment of the young irrigated their limbs, filling the sensuous nerves and arteries with a delicious narcotism—­a deep, quiet, healthful sleep, lulled by the chant of the serene mother-forest.