to fall back on some place or other, and were only waiting for General Tom Harris, who was expected to arrive at any moment; so they tried to persuade us to wait a little while, but the majority of us said no, we were accustomed to falling back, and didn’t need any of Tom Harris’s help; we could get along perfectly well without him and save time too.  So about half of our fifteen, including myself, mounted and left on the instant; the others yielded to persuasion and stayed—­stayed through the war.

An hour later we met General Harris on the road, with two or three people in his company—­his staff, probably, but we could not tell; none of them was in uniform; uniforms had not come into vogue among us yet.  Harris ordered us back; but we told him there was a Union colonel coming with a whole regiment in his wake, and it looked as if there was going to be a disturbance; so we had concluded to go home.  He raged a little, but it was of no use; our minds were made up.  We had done our share; had killed one man, exterminated one army, such as it was; let him go and kill the rest, and that would end the war.  I did not see that brisk young general again until last year; then he was wearing white hair and whiskers.

In time I came to know that Union colonel whose coming frightened me out of the war and crippled the Southern cause to that extent—­General Grant.  I came within a few hours of seeing him when he was as unknown as I was myself; at a time when anybody could have said, ’Grant?—­Ulysses S. Grant?  I do not remember hearing the name before.’  It seems difficult to realise that there was once a time when such a remark could be rationally made; but there was, and I was within a few miles of the place and the occasion too, though proceeding in the other direction.

The thoughtful will not throw this war-paper of mine lightly aside as being valueless.  It has this value:  it is a not unfair picture of what went on in many and many a militia camp in the first months of the rebellion, when the green recruits were without discipline, without the steadying and heartening influence or trained leaders; when all their circumstances were new and strange, and charged with exaggerated terrors, and before the invaluable experience of actual collision in the field had turned them from rabbits into soldiers.  If this side of the picture of that early day has not before been put into history, then history has been to that degree incomplete, for it had and has its rightful place there.  There was more Bull Run material scattered through the early camps of this country than exhibited itself at Bull Run.  And yet it learned its trade presently, and helped to fight the great battles later.  I could have become a soldier myself, if I had waited.  I had got part of it learned; I knew more about retreating than the man that invented retreating.