“Do you believe in presentiments and superstitions?” said another of the Fourteenth.  There was Fisher Pray, Orderly Sergeant of Company I. He came from Waterville, O., where his folks are now living.  The day before we started out he had a presentiment that we were going into a fight, and that he would be killed.  He couldn’t shake it off.  He told the Lieutenant, and some of the boys about it, and they tried to ridicule him out of it, but it was no good.  When the sharp firing broke out in front some of the boys said, ‘Fisher, I do believe you are right,’ and he nodded his head mournfully.  When we were piling knapsacks for the charge, the Lieutenant, who was a great friend of Fisher’s, said: 

“Fisher, you stay here and guard the knapsacks.’

“Fisher’s face blazed in an instant.

“No, sir,’ said he; I never shirked a fight yet, and I won’t begin now.’

“So he went into the fight, and was killed, as he knew he would be.  Now, that’s what I call nerve.”

“The same thing was true of Sergeant Arthur Tarbox, of Company A,” said the narrator; “he had a presentiment, too; he knew he was going to be killed, if he went in, and he was offered an honorable chance to stay out, but he would not take it, and went in and was killed.”

“Well, we staid there the next day, buried our dead, took care of our wounded, and gathered up the plunder we had taken from the Johnnies.  The rest of the army went off, ‘hot blocks,’ after Hardee and the rest of Hood’s army, which it was hoped would be caught outside of entrenchments.  But Hood had too much the start, and got into the works at Lovejoy, ahead of our fellows.  The night before we heard several very loud explosions up to the north.  We guessed what that meant, and so did the Twentieth Corps, who were lying back at the Chattahoochee, and the next morning the General commanding—­Slocum—­sent out a reconnaissance.  It was met by the Mayor of Atlanta, who said that the Rebels had blown up their stores and retreated.  The Twentieth Corps then came in and took ’possession of the City, and the next day—­the 3d—­Sherman came in, and issued an order declaring the campaign at an end, and that we would rest awhile and refit.

“We laid around Atlanta a good while, and things quieted down so that it seemed almost like peace, after the four months of continual fighting we had gone through.  We had been under a strain so long that now we boys went in the other direction, and became too careless, and that’s how we got picked up.  We went out about five miles one night after a lot of nice smoked hams that a nigger told us were stored in an old cotton press, and which we knew would be enough sight better eating for Company C, than the commissary pork we had lived on so long.  We found the cotton press, and the hams, just as the nigger told us, and we hitched up a team to take them into camp.  As we hadn’t seen any Johnny signs anywhere, we set our guns down to help load the meat, and just as we all came stringing out to the wagon with as much meat as we could carry, a company of Ferguson’s Cavalry popped out of the woods about one hundred yards in front of us and were on top of us before we could say I scat.  You see they’d heard of the meat, too.”