of there as if they had been sent for in a hurry.  We chased after ’em as fast as we could, and picked up just lots of ’em.  Finally it began to be real funny.  A Johnny’s wind would begin to give out he’d fall behind his comrades; he’d hear us yell and think that we were right behind him, ready to sink a bayonet through him’; he’d turn around, throw up his hands, and sing out: 

“I surrender, mister!  I surrender!’ and find that we were a hundred feet off, and would have to have a bayonet as long as one of McClellan’s general orders to touch him.

“Well, my company was the left of our regiment, and our regiment was the left of the brigade, and we swung out ahead of all the rest of the boys.  In our excitement of chasing the Johnnies, we didn’t see that we had passed an angle of their works.  About thirty of us had become separated from the company and were chasing a squad of about seventy-five or one hundred.  We had got up so close to them that we hollered: 

“‘Halt there, now, or we’ll blow your heads off.’

“They turned round with, ‘halt yourselves; you ——­ Yankee ——­ ——­’

“We looked around at this, and saw that we were not one hundred feet away from the angle of the works, which were filled with Rebels waiting for our fellows to get to where they could have a good flank fire upon them.  There was nothing to do but to throw down our guns and surrender, and we had hardly gone inside of the works, until the Johnnies opened on our brigade and drove it back.  This ended the battle at Spottsylvania Court House.”

Second Boy (irrelevantly.) “Some day the underpinning will fly out from under the South, and let it sink right into the middle kittle o’ hell.”

First Boy (savagely.) “I only wish the whole Southern Confederacy was hanging over hell by a single string, and I had a knife.”

CHAPTER XLIV.

Rebel music—­singular lack of the creative power among the southerners —­contrast with similar people elsewhere—­their favorite music, and where it was borrowed from—­A fifer with one tune.

I have before mentioned as among the things that grew upon one with increasing acquaintance with the Rebels on their native heath, was astonishment at their lack of mechanical skill and at their inability to grapple with numbers and the simpler processes of arithmetic.  Another characteristic of the same nature was their wonderful lack of musical ability, or of any kind of tuneful creativeness.

Elsewhere, all over the world, people living under similar conditions to the Southerners are exceedingly musical, and we owe the great majority of the sweetest compositions which delight the ear and subdue the senses to unlettered song-makers of the Swiss mountains, the Tyrolese valleys, the Bavarian Highlands, and the minstrels of Scotland, Ireland and Wales.