erging to a light blue, with
butternut as the predominant color. They wore gray jackets, short of
waist and single-breasted. Caps were giving way to soft felt hats,
and boots had already been supplanted by broad, strong shoes, called
brogans.

Many of the soldiers carried frying pans and skillets hung on the
barrels of their rifles, simple kitchen utensils which constituted
almost the whole of their cooking equipment. Their blankets and rubber
sheets for sleeping were carried in light rolls on their backs. A
toothbrush was stuck in a buttonhole. On their flanks or in front rode
the cavalry, led by the redoubtable Turner Ashby, and there was in
all their number scarcely a single horseman who did not ride like the
Comanche Indian, as if he were born in the saddle. Ashby was a host in
himself. He had often ridden as much as eighty miles a day to inspect
his own pickets and those of the enemy, and it was told of him that he
had once gone inside the Union lines in the disguise of a horse doctor.

The Northern cavalry, unused to the saddle, compared very badly with
those of the South in the early years of the war. Ashby's men, moreover,
rode over country that they had known all their lives. There was no
forest footpath, no train among the hills hidden from them. But the
cannon of Jackson's army was inferior. Here the mechanical genius of the
North showed supreme.

Such was the little army of Jackson, somber to see, which marched forth
upon a campaign unrivalled in the history of war. The men whom they
were to meet were of staunch stock and spirit themselves. Banks, their
commander, had worked in his youth as a common laborer in a cotton mill,
and had forced himself up by vigor and energy, but Shields was a veteran
of the Mexican War. Most of the troops had come from the west, and they,
too, were used to every kind of privation and hardship.

Harry's duties carried him back and forth with the marching columns,
but he lingered longest beside the Invincibles, only a regiment now, and
that regiment composed almost wholly of Virginians. St. Clair was still
in the smartest of uniforms, a contrast to the others, and as he nodded
to Harry he told him that the troops expected to meet the enemy before
night.

"I don't know how they got that belief," he said, "but I know it extends
to all our men. What about it, Harry?"

"Stonewall Jackson alone knows, and he's not telling."

"They say that Banks is coming with ten to one!" said