the station, there was the old Manassas Gap railroad, there
was the train of freight and cattle cars--ever so many freight and
cattle cars! Company after company the men piled in; by ten o'clock
every car was filled, and the platforms and roofs had their quota. The
crazy old engine blew its whistle, the First Brigade was off for
Manassas. Bee, Bartow, and Elzey, arriving at Piedmont in the course of
the morning, were not so fortunate. The railroad had promised, barring
unheard-of accident, to place the four brigades in Manassas by sunrise
of the twentieth. The accident duly arrived. There was a collision, the
track was obstructed, and only the 7th and 8th Georgia got through. The
remainder of the infantry waited perforce at Piedmont, a portion of it
for two mortal days, and that without rations. The artillery and the
cavalry--the latter having now come up--marched by the wagon road and
arrived in fair time.

From ten in the morning until sunset the First Brigade and the Manassas
Gap train crept like a tortoise through the July weather, by rustling
cornfields, by stream and wood, by farmhouse and village. It was hot in
the freight and cattle cars, hot, cinderish, and noisy. With here and
there an exception the men took off their coats, loosened the shoes from
their feet, made themselves easy in any way that suggested itself. The
subtle _give_, the slip out of convention and restraint back toward a
less trammelled existence, the faint return of the more purely
physical, the slight withdrawal of the more purely mental, the rapid
breaking down of the sheer artificial--these and other marks of one of
the many predicates of war began to show themselves in this journey. But
at the village stations there came a change. Women and girls were
gathered here, in muslin freshness, with food and drink for "our
heroes." The apparel discarded between stations was assiduously
reassumed whenever the whistle blew. "Our heroes" looked out of freight
and cattle car, somewhat grimy, perhaps, but clothed and in their right
mind, with a becoming bloom upon them of eagerness, deference, and
patriotic willingness to die in Virginia's defence. The dispensers of
nectar and ambrosia loved them all, sped them on to Manassas with many a
prayer and God bless you!

At sunset the whistle shrieked its loudest. It was their destination.
The train jolted and jerked to a halt. Regiment by regiment, out poured
the First Brigade, fell into line, and was doubl