give him the surprise of his life.

One quiet, star-lit summer night, while on picket between Bolivar and
Toone's, I had the good fortune to witness the flight of the largest
and most brilliant meteor I ever have seen. It was a little after
midnight, and I was standing alone at my post, looking, listening, and
thinking. Suddenly there came a loud, rushing, roaring sound, like a
passenger train close by, going at full speed, and there in the west
was a meteor! Its flight was from the southwest to the northeast,
parallel with the horizon, and low down. Its head, or body, looked like
a huge ball of fire, and it left behind a long, immense tail of
brilliant white, that lighted up all the western heavens. While yet in
full view, it exploded with a crash like a near-by clap of thunder,
there was a wide, glittering shower of sparks,--and then silence and
darkness. The length of time it was visible could not have been more
than a few seconds, but it was a most extraordinary spectacle.

On October 19th the regiment (except those on guard duty) went as
escort of a foraging expedition to a big plantation about twelve miles
from Bolivar down the Hatchie river. We rode there and back in the big
government wagons, each wagon being drawn by a team of six mules. Like
Joseph's brethren when they went down into Egypt, we were after corn.
The plantation we foraged was an extensive one on the fertile bottom
land of the Hatchie river, and the owner that year had grown several
hundred acres of corn, which had all been gathered, or shocked, and we
just took it as we found it. The people evidently were wealthy for that
time and locality, many slaves were on the place, and it was abounding
in live stock and poultry of all kinds. The plantation in general
presented a scene of rural plenty and abundance that reminded me of the
home of old Baltus Van Tassel, as described by Washington Irving in the
story of "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,"--with this difference:
Everything about the Tennessee plantation was dirty, out of order, and
in general higgledy-piggledy condition. And the method of farming was
slovenly in the extreme. The cultivated land had been cleared by
cutting away the underbrush and small trees, while the big ones had
merely been "deadened," by girdling them near the ground. These dead
trees were all standing in ghastly nakedness, and so thick in many
places that it must have been difficult to plow through them, while
flocks of crows a