members of the command of the summons, and to
deliver the order for their attendance at a given point next day.
It seemed that a sudden and great change had come. It was the actual
appearance of what had hitherto only been theoretical--war. The next
morning the Captain, in full uniform, took leave of the assembled
plantation, with a few solemn words commending all he left behind to
God, and galloped away up the big road to join and lead his battery to
the war, and to be gone just four years.

Within a month he was on "the Peninsula" with Magruder, guarding
Virginia on the east against the first attack. His camp was first at
Yorktown and then on Jamestown Island, the honor having been assigned
his battery of guarding the oldest cradle of the race on this continent.
It was at "Little Bethel" that his guns were first trained on the enemy,
and that the battery first saw what they had to do, and from this time
until the middle of April, 1865, they were in service, and no battery
saw more service or suffered more in it. Its story was a part of
the story of the Southern Army in Virginia. The Captain was a rigid
disciplinarian, and his company had more work to do than most new
companies. A pious churchman, of the old puritanical type not uncommon
to Virginia, he looked after the spiritual as well as the physical
welfare of his men, and his chaplain or he read prayers at the head of
his company every morning during the war. At first he was not popular
with the men, he made the duties of camp life so onerous to them, it was
"nothing but drilling and praying all the time," they said. But he had
not commanded very long before they came to know the stuff that was in
him. He had not been in service a year before he had had four horses
shot under him, and when later on he was offered the command of a
battalion, the old company petitioned to be one of his batteries, and
still remained under his command. Before the first year was out the
battery had, through its own elements, and the discipline of the
Captain, become a cohesive force, and a distinct integer in the Army
of Northern Virginia. Young farmer recruits knew of its prestige and
expressed preference for it of many batteries of rapidly growing or
grown reputation. Owing to its high stand, the old and clumsy guns with
which it had started out were taken from it, and in their place was
presented a battery of four fine, brass, twelve-pound Napoleons of
the newest and most approved k