musician belonging to the Fourth Ohio, when six miles out of Beverly,
on his way to Phillippi, was fired upon and instantly killed. So goes
what little there is of war in Western Virginia.

20. The most interesting of all days in the mountains is one on which
the sky is filled with floating clouds, not hiding it entirely, but
leaving here and there patches of blue. Then the shadows shift from
place to place, as the moving clouds either let in the sunshine or
exclude it. Standing at my tent-door at eleven o'clock in the morning,
with a stiff breeze going, and the clouds on the wing, we see a peak,
now in the sunshine, then in the shadow, and the lights and shadows
chasing each other from point to point over the mountains, presenting
altogether a panorama most beautiful to look upon, and such an one as
God only can present.

I can almost believe now that men become, to some extent, like the
country in which they live. In the plain country the inhabitants learn
to traffic, come to regard money-getting as the great object in life,
and have but a dim perception of those higher emotions from which spring
the noblest acts. In a mountain country God has made many things
sublime, and some things very beautiful. The rugged, the smooth, the
sunshine, and the shadow meet one at every turn. Here are peaks getting
the earliest sunlight of the morning, and the latest of the evening;
ravines so deep the light of day can never penetrate them; bold, rugged,
perpendicular rocks, which have breasted the storms for ages; gentle
slopes, swelling away until their summits seem to dip in the blue sky;
streams, cold and clear, leaping from crag to crag, and rushing down
nobody knows whither. Like the country, may we not look to find the
people unpolished, rugged and uneven, capable of the noblest heroism or
the most infernal villainy--their lives full of lights and shadows,
elevations and depressions?

The mountains, rising one above another, suggest, forcibly enough, the
infinite power of the Creator, and when the peaks come in contact with
the clouds it requires but little imagination to make one feel that God,
as at Sinai, has set His foot upon the earth, and that earth and heaven
are really very near each other.

21. This morning, at two o'clock, I was rattled up by a sentinel, who
had come to camp in hot haste to inform me that he had seen and fired
upon a body of twenty-five or more men, probably the advance guard of
the enemy. He desi