now?

The following is inserted, like the rest not on account of any
intrinsic merit it may be thought to have, nor indeed on account of
any sympathy for the slave which it might have been employed to
express--though there was probably no lack of that--but because it
illustrates, in words and music, a certain sentimental vein of feeling
which found frequent utterance, not very soldier-like it must be
confessed, nor indulged when serious work was before us to do, but
quite natural to us now that we had caught half-visions of home, albeit
in the intervening sky there were omens of doubtful import.

There's a low green valley on the old Kentucky shore;
There I've whiled many happy hours away,
A sitting and a singing by the little cottage door
Where lived my darling Nelly Gray.

CHORUS:

Oh, my poor Nelly Gray, they have taken you away,
And I'll never see my darling any more,
I'm sitting by the river and I'm weeping all the day,
For you've gone from the old Kentucky shore.

One night I went to see her, but she's gone, the neighbours say,
The white man has bound her with his chain;
They have taken her to Georgia for to wear her life away,
As she toils in the cotton and the cane.

My eyes are getting blinded and I cannot see my way,
Hark! there's somebody knocking at the door;
Oh, I hear the angels calling and I see my Nelly Gray;
Farewell to the old Kentucky shore.

CHORUS:

Oh, my Nelly Gray, up in heaven there they say
They will never take you from me any more;
I'm a coming, coming, coming as the angels clear the way;
Farewell to the old Kentucky shore.

We had dropped down on the ground with our harness on expecting to hear
the "Fall in" at any moment; but it was in the edge of the evening
before we were summoned to resume the march. A mile or two further
brought us to camping ground in a rough, ploughed field within about a
mile of Boonesboro'. As dark was fast coming on all hands set to, on
breaking ranks, and brought rails for fires and bedding! It was
astonishing to watch the effect of this instantaneous assault upon the
fences. They melted away before the eyes very much like a flake of snow
does on the warm ground; it disappears while you are looking at it,
almost before you have half realized that it is going! The pots were on
in a trice, and by the time we