ndabout way. Close up--close up!" The colonel rode along the
line. "What's the matter here? You aren't going to a funeral! Think it's
a fox hunt, boys, and step out lively!" A courier arrived from the head
of the column. "General Jackson's compliments to Colonel Brooke, and he
says if this regiment isn't in step in three minutes he'll leave it with
the sick in Winchester!"

The First Brigade, followed by Bee, Bartow, and Elzey, marched sullenly
down the turnpike, into Winchester, and through its dusty streets. The
people were all out, old men, boys, and women thronging the brick
sidewalks. The army had seventeen hundred sick in the town. Pale faces
looked out of upper windows; men just recovering from dysentery, from
measles, from fever, stumbled out of shady front yards and fell into
line; others, more helpless, started, then wavered back. "Boys, boys!
you ain't never going to leave us here for the Yanks to take?
Boys--boys--" The citizens, too, had their say. "Is Winchester to be
left to Patterson? We've done our best by you--and you go marching
away!" Several of the older women were weeping, the younger looked
scornful. _Close up, men, close up--close up!_

The First Brigade was glad when it was through the town. Before it,
leading southward through the Valley of Virginia, stretched the great
pike, a hundred and twenty miles of road, traversing as fair, rich, and
happy a region as war ever found a paradise and left a desolation. To
the east towered the Blue Ridge, to west the Great North and Shenandoah
Mountains, twenty miles to the south Massanutton rose like a Gibraltar
from the rolling fields of wheat and corn, the orchard lands and
pleasant pastures. The region was one of old mills, turning flashing
wheels, of comfortable red brick houses and well-stored barns, of fair
market towns, of a noble breed of horses, and of great, white-covered
wagons, of clear waters and sweet gardens, of an honest, thrifty, brave,
and intelligent people. It was a fair country, and many of the army
were at home there, but the army had at the moment no taste for its
beauties. It wanted to see Patterson's long, blue lines; it wanted to
drive them out of Virginia, across the Potomac, back to where they came
from.

The First Brigade was dispirited and critical, and as it had not yet
learned to control its mood, it marched as a dispirited and critical
person would be apt to march in the brazen middle of a July day. Every
spring and rivul