dy never recovered.

Every day at twelve o'clock sharp delicious watermelons were brought
from the icehouse to the shade of the stately oaks which adorned the
spacious lawn; then, two hours later, after a sumptuous dinner, a
small darky brought from the kitchen a shovel of coals (matches were not
a Southern product) to light our pipes. So the time passed. It was to
this hospitable home that General Lee retired with his family
immediately after Appomattox, and was living on this estate when he
accepted the presidency of Washington College.

[Illustration: ROBERT FRAZER]

My wounds being now sufficiently, or rather temporarily, healed, I
embarked about bedtime at Cartersville on the canal packet boat. On my
way to a berth in the cabin I noticed, by the dim light, a
striking-looking man clad in white lying in his berth. On the deck of
the boat were a score or more of negroes, male and female, singing so
boisterously that the other passengers could not sleep. Such conduct at
this time was felt to be significant, and the more so as the officers of
the boat refrained from interfering. Without intimation there was a leap
from my neighboring bunk, a hurried scramble up the stairway, followed
by a volley of--secular language, with a demand for instantaneous choice
between "dead silence and dead niggers." Thenceforward stillness
prevailed, broken at intervals when the plaintive windings of the packet
horn, rising and falling with the motion of the tandem team, heralded
our approach to a lock. Who that ever boarded that ancient craft, or
dwelt within its sound, will cease to recall the associations awakened
by the voice of the old packet horn?

Next morning I recognized my fellow-countyman, Bob Greenlee, of the
First Virginia Cavalry, as the man whose eloquence had terrorized the
negroes. Greenlee has been aptly styled "a rare bird," and the accounts
he gave of experiences during his sick-leave, from which he was now
returning, were as good as "David Harum."

I found the battery stationed at New Market, on the north side of the
James, near Dutch Gap. During my absence it had suffered the only
serious loss of the kind it had experienced during the war--the capture
of all four of its twenty-pound Parrott guns at Deep Bottom. The horses,
as usual, had been taken to the rear for safety. The infantry support
had been out-flanked, leaving our guns almost surrounded, so that the
cannoneers escaped with difficulty--only one of them,