o-morrow Banks and
Milroy'll saunter along and dig us up! There's old Watkin's bugle! Home
Guard, come along and drill!"

Staunton did little sleeping that Saturday night. Jackson was
gone--Ashby with him. There was not a Confederate vedette between the
town and Banks at Harrisonburg--the latter was probably moving down the
pike this very night, in the dark of the moon. Soldiers of Edward
Johnson--tall Georgians and 44th Virginians--had been in town that
Saturday, but they two were gone, suddenly recalled to their camp, seven
miles west, on the Parkersburg road. Scouts had reported to Johnson that
Milroy was concentrating at M'Dowell, twenty miles to the westward, and
that Schenck, sent on by Fremont, had joined or would join him. Any hour
they might move eastward on Staunton. Banks--Fremont--Milroy--three
armies, forty thousand men--all converging on Staunton and its Home
Guard, with the intent to make it even as Winchester! Staunton felt
itself the mark of the gods, a mournful Rome, an endangered Athens, a
tottering Carthage.

Sunday morning, clear and fine, had its church bells. The children went
to Sunday School, where they learned of Goliath and the brook Hebron,
and David and his sling. At church time the pews were well
filled--chiefly old men and women and young boys. The singing was
fervent, the prayers were yet more so. The people prayed very humbly and
heartily for their Confederacy, for their President and his Cabinet, and
for Congress, for their Capital, so endangered, for their armies and
their generals, for every soldier who wore the grey, for their blocked
ports, for New Orleans, fallen last week, for Norfolk that the
authorities said must be abandoned, for Johnston and Magruder on the
Peninsula--at that very hour, had they known it, in grips with Hancock
at Williamsburg.

Benediction pronounced, the congregation came out of the churchyards in
time to greet with delight, not unmixed with a sense of the pathos of
it, certain just arrived reinforcements. Four companies of Virginia
Military Institute cadets, who, their teachers at their head, had been
marched down for the emergency from Lexington, thirty-eight miles away.
Flushed, boyish, trig, grey and white uniformed, with shining muskets,
seventeen years old at most, beautifully marching with their band and
their colours, amidst plaudits, tears, laughter, flowers, thrown kisses,
they came down the street, wheeled, and before the court house were
recei