emed unattempted
except by some stray blue-bird. Jays were as loud and busy as at the
North in autumn; there were sparrows and wrens; and sometimes I noticed
the shy and whimsical chewink.

From this early spring-time onward, there seemed no great difference in
atmospheric sensations, and only a succession of bloom. After two months
one's notions of the season grew bewildered, just as very early rising
bewilders the day. In the army one is perhaps roused after a bivouac,
marches before daybreak, halts, fights, somebody is killed, a long
day's life has been lived, and after all it is not seven o'clock, and
breakfast is not ready. So when we had lived in summer so long as hardly
to remember winter, it suddenly occurred to us that it was not yet June.
One escapes at the South that mixture of hunger and avarice which is
felt in the Northern summer, counting each hour's joy with the sad
consciousness that an hour is gone. The compensating loss is in missing
those soft, sweet, liquid sensations of the Northern spring, that burst
of life and joy, those days of heaven that even April brings; and this
absence of childhood in the year creates a feeling of hardness in the
season, like that I have suggested in the melody of the Southern
birds. It seemed to me also that the woods had not those pure, clean,
_innocent_ odors which so abound in the New England forest in
early spring; but there was something luscious, voluptuous, almost
oppressively fragrant about the magnolias, as if they belonged not to
Hebe, but to Magdalen.

Such immense and lustrous butterflies I had never seen but in dreams;
and not even dreams had prepared me for sand-flies. Almost too small to
be seen, they inflicted a bite which appeared larger than themselves,--a
positive wound, more torturing than that of a mosquito, and leaving
more annoyance behind. These tormentors elevated dress-parade into the
dignity of a military engagement. I had to stand motionless, with my
head a mere nebula of winged atoms, while tears rolled profusely down my
face, from mere muscular irritation. Had I stirred a finger, the whole
battalion would have been slapping its cheeks. Such enemies were,
however, a valuable aid to discipline, on the whole, as they abounded
in the guard-house, and made that institution an object of unusual
abhorrence among the men.

The presence of ladies and the homelike air of everything, made the
picket station a very popular resort while we were there.