e cavalry brigade doing picket duty at this
point is composed of the First Virginia (many of whose men were raised
in these parts), the First Vermont, the Fifth New York, and the
Eighteenth Pennsylvania. The latter of these regiments has but recently
been mustered into the service, is poorly drilled and worse equipped,
and is by no means fitted to picket against so wily a foe as Mosby.
Though great caution is exercised by Colonel Percy Wyndham, who is in
command of the brigade, to arrange and change the alternation of the
pickets, so that the regiments to picket at a given point may not be
known beforehand; yet by means of Miss Ratcliffe and her rebellions
sisterhood, Mosby is generally informed of the regiment doing duty, and
his attacks are usually directed against the unskilled and unsuspecting.

Having approached, under cover of the night above alluded to, within a
few hundred yards of the pickets, whose position and strength he knew
very well from information received by the neighbors, the horses were
left in charge of one man, while the party skulked along through the
thick underbrush, until they could approach the post from the direction
of the Union camp. The picket relief was mostly quartered in an old
house near by, with a single sentinel stationed at the door. Seeing the
Mosby party approaching, he supposed that they were a patrol, and
consequently allowed them to come within a few paces of the house before
he challenged them. But it was now too late; and springing forward like
panthers, the guerillas presented their pistols at his head, ordering a
surrender. The house was immediately surrounded and the assailants began
to fire through the thin weather-boarding upon the men shut up within.
This fire, however, was vigorously returned for a time, but yielding at
last to superior numbers, who had greatly the advantage, the whole party
was compelled to surrender.

The success with which Mosby carried on his operations made him a sort
of terror to our pickets, while it attracted to him from all quarters of
Rebeldom a larger and more enthusiastic command. They became wonderfully
skilled and bold, as may be seen by the following daring exploit. On
the night of the eighth of March, during rain and intense darkness,
Mosby led a squadron of his conglomerate command through the pines
between the pickets near the Turnpike from Centreville to Fairfax Court
House. Striking through the country, so as to avoid some infantry