and in going on to Richmond afterwards fell asleep every few minutes on horseback.

Two hours of slumber, however, made Stuart as fresh as a lark; and having eaten Mr. C― very nearly out of house and home, we pushed on all day. At night the column stopped, and I thought the General would stop too; but he said, "I am going to Richmond to-night; would you like to ride with me?" I was obliged to decline; my horse was worn out. Stuart set out by himself, rode all night, and before daylight had passed over the thirty miles. An hour afterwards General Lee and the President knew the result of his expedition. The cavalry returned on the same day, moving slowly in front of the gunboats, which fired upon them; but no harm was done. Richmond was reached; and amid an ovation from delighted friends we all went to sleep.

romance

Such was Stuart's ride around McClellan's army in those summer days of 1862. The men who went with him look back to it as the most romantic and adventurous incident of the war. It was not indeed so much a military expedition as a raid of -a "scout" of Stuart's with fifteen hundred horsemen ! It was the conception of a bold and brilliant mind, and the execution was as fearless. "That was the most dangerous of all my expeditions," the General said to me long afterwards; "if I had not succeeded in crossing the Chickahominy, I would have been ruined, as there was no way of getting out." The Emperor Napoleon, a good soldier, took this view of it; when tracing out on the map Stuart's route from Taylorsville by Old Church to the lower Chickahominy, he characterized the movement as that of a cavalry officer of the first distinction. This criticism was only just, and the raid will live in history for three reasons:

1. It taught the enemy "the trick," and showed them the meaning of the words "cavalry raid." What General Kilpatrick, Sheridan, and others afterwards effected, was the work of the pupil following the master.

2. It was on a magnificent arena, to which the eyes of the whole world were attracted at the time; and,

3. In consequence of the information which Stuart furnished,

Gen. Lee, a fortnight afterwards, attacked and defeated General McClellan.

These circumstances give a very great interest to all the incidents of the movement. I hope the reader has not been wearied by my minute record of them. To the old soldiers of Stuart there is a melancholy pleasure in recalling the gay scenes amid which he moved, the exploits which he performed, the hard work he did. He is gone; but ever in memory it is something to again follow his feather.

II.

STUART ON THE OUTPOST.

A SCENE AT CAMP QUI VIVE.

I.

SOMETIMES, in dreams as it were, the present writer-like many others, doubtless-goes back in memory across the gulf of years to 1861, recalling its great scenes and personages, and living once more in that epoch full of such varied and passionate emotions. Manassas! Centreville! Fairfax! Vienna !-what memories do those names excite in the hearts of the old soldiers of Beauregard! That country, now so desolate, was then a virgin land, untouched by the foot of war. The hosts who were to trample it still lingered upon the banks of the Potomac; and the wildest fancy could not have prefigured its fate. It was a smiling country, full of joy and beauty-the domain of "ancient peace;" and of special attraction were the little villages, sleeping like Centreville in the hollow of green hills, or perched like Fairfax on the summit of picturesque uplands. These were old Virginia hamlets, full of recollections; here the feet of Mason and Washington had trod, and here had grown up generation after generation ignorant of war. Peace reigned supreme; the whole landscape was the picture of repose; the villages, amid the foliage of their elms or oaks, slept like birds that have nestled down to rest amid the grass and blossoms of the green spring fields.

once smiling in fresh

Look first upon that picture, then on this!-the picture of a region blasted by the hot breath of war. Where now was the joy of the past? where the lovely land beauty, and the charm of peaceful years? sunshine had disappeared. The springing grasses, the budding forests, the happy dwellings-all had vanished.

All the flowers and

Over the smil

ing fields the hoofs of cavalry had trampled; the woods had been cut down to furnish fuel for the camp fires; the fences had preceded them; the crops and forage had been gleaned for the horses of the troopers. The wheels of artillery and army trains had worn the roads into ruts and quagmires; opposing columns had advanced or retreated over every foot of ground, leaving their traces everywhere; those furrows over which the broomstraw waved in the winter wind, or the spring flowers nodded in the airs of May, were ploughed by cannon-balls.

The war-dogs had bayed here, and torn to pieces house and field and forest. The villages were the forlorn ghosts of themselves, and seemed to look at you out of those vacant eyes, their open windows, with a sort of dumb despair. They were the eloquent monuments of the horrors of war-the veritable "abodes of owls." Had a raven croaked from the dead trees riven by cannon-balls, or a wolf growled at you from the deserted houses, you would have felt not the least astonishment. As you passed through those villages, once so smiling, the tramp of the cavalry horses, or the rumbling wheels of the artillery, made the echoes resound; and a few heads were thrust from the paneless windows. Then they disappeared; silence settled down again, and the melancholy hamlet gave place to the more melancholy fields. Here all was waste and desolate; no woods, no fences, no human face; only torn-down and dismantled houses, riddled with bullets, or charred by the torch of war. The land seemed doomed, and to rest under a curse. That Federal vedette yonder, as we advance, is the only living object we behold, and even he disappears like a phantom. Can this, you murmur, be the laughing land of yesterday, the abode of peace, and happiness, and joy? Can this be Fairfax, where the fields of wheat once rolled their golden waves in the summer

wind, and the smiling houses held out arms of welcome? Look! it has become a veritable Golgotha-the "place of skulls”—ɑ sombre Jehoshaphat full of dead men's bones!

I remember all that, and shall ever remember it; but in contrast with these scenes of ruin and desolation, come back a thousand memories, gay, joyous, and instinct with mirth. The hard trade of war is not all tragedy; let us laugh, friends, when we can; there are smiles as well as tears, comedy as well as tragedy, in the great and exciting drama. You don't weep much when the sword is in the hand. You fight hard; and if you do not fall, you laugh, and even dance, perhaps—if you can get some music by the camp fire. It is a scene of this description which I wish to describe to-day. This morning it came back to my memory in such vivid colours that I thought, if I could paint it, some of my readers would be interested. It took place in autumn of the gay year 1861, when Johnston and Beauregard were holding the lines of Centreville against McClellan; and when Stuart, that pearl of cavaliers, was in command of the front, which he guarded with his cavalry. In their camps at Centreville, the infantry and artillery of the army quietly enjoyed the bad weather which forbade all military movements; but the cavalry, that "eye and ear" of an army, were still in face of the enemy, and had constant skirmishes below Fairfax, out toward Vienna, and along the front near the little hamlet of Annandale.

How well I remember all those scenes! and I think if I had space I could tell some interesting stories of that obstinate petiteguerre of picket fighting-how the gray and blue coats fought for the ripe fruit in an orchard just between them, all a winter's afternoon; how Farley waylaid, with three men, the whole column of General Bayard, and attacked it; and how a brave boy fell one day in a fight of pickets, and was brought back dead, wrapped in the brilliant oil-cloth which his sister took from her piano and had sent to him to sleep upon.

But these recollections would not interest you as they interest They fade, and I come back to my immediate subjecta visit to General "Jeb Stuart" at his headquarters, near Fair

me.