eon" gun,
with four men, in deeply plowed ground, and the strong excitement of
battle--altogether, it was the hottest place I ever saw, or hope I shall
_ever_ see, in this world, or in the world to come. It nearly melted the
marrow in our bones!

A persimmon sapling stood near our gun. It was trimmed, and chipped
down, twig by twig, and limb by limb, by pieces of shell, until it was a
lot of _scraps scattered over the ground_. Sam Vaden, as he passed me,
with a shell, said "Dame, just look back over this field behind us. A
mosquito couldn't fly across that field without getting hit." It looked
so! The dirt was being knocked up, wherever you looked, literally, by
_shower_ of balls, and shell fragments. It had the appearance of hail
striking on the surface of water, only it wasn't cold.

Well! for three mortal hours this battle raged. They hammered us, and we
hammered them. Occasionally, we saw a Federal caisson blown up, which
refreshed us, and several of their guns ceased firing--disabled or
cannoneers cleared out, we thought--and _this_ refreshed us. We wished
they would _all_ blow up, and stop shooting.

After we had been under fire sometime, with nobody hurt as yet, a
case-shot burst in front of us, and Hardy, who had just brought up a
shell, and was standing right by me, said, in his usual deliberate way,
"Dame, I'm hit, and hit very hard, I am afraid." "Where are you hit?" I
asked. He said, "I'm shot through the thigh, and the leg is numbed." I
fired the gun, and jumped down to see what I could do for him. I found
the place, and it looked ugly. There was a clean-cut hole right through
his pants, to the thickest part of the thigh. I put my finger into the
hole, and tore away the cloth to get at the wound, and found to my
great, and his _greater_ delight, that the ball had struck, and glanced.
It had made a long black bruise and the pain was much greater than if it
had gone through the leg. It had struck the great mass of muscle on the
outer thigh, and the leg was, for the time, paralyzed and stiff as a
poker. He was completely disabled. I said, "Bill, you must get right
away from here." "But I _can't_ walk a step." "Well crawl off on your
hands and your good foot, not a man could leave the gun, to help you,
and go out to the side so as to get soonest from under fire." So the
poor fellow hobbled off, as best he could, all alone, amidst the
laughter of the fellows at his novel locomotion. We could see the
bullets k