eye was fixed on a little log cabin, far away
to the north, in the backwoods of western Illinois. I could see my
father sitting on the porch, reading the little local newspaper
brought from the post-office the evening before. There was my
mother getting my little brothers ready for Sunday-school; the old
dog lying asleep in the sun; the hens cackling about the barn; all
these things and a hundred other tender recollections rushed into
my mind. I am not ashamed to say now that I would willingly have
given a general quit-claim deed for every jot and tittle of
military glory falling to me, past, present, and to come, if I only
could have been miraculously and instantaneously set down in the
yard of that peaceful little home, a thousand miles away from the
haunts of fighting men.

The time we thus stood, waiting the attack, could not have exceeded
five minutes. Suddenly, obliquely to our right, there was a long,
wavy flash of bright light, then another, and another! It was the
sunlight shining on gun barrels and bayonets--and--there they were
at last! A long brown line, with muskets at a right shoulder shift,
in excellent order, right through the woods they came.

We began firing at once. From one end of the regiment to the other
leaped a sheet of red flame, and the roar that went up from the
edge of that old field doubtless advised General Prentiss of the
fact that the Rebels had at last struck the extreme left of his
line. We had fired but two or three rounds when, for some
reason,--I never knew what,--we were ordered to fall back across
the field, and did so. The whole line, so far as I could see to the
right, went back. We halted on the other side of the field, in the
edge of the woods, in front of our tents, and again began firing.
The Rebels, of course, had moved up and occupied the line we had
just abandoned. And here we did our first hard fighting during the
day. Our officers said, after the battle was over, that we held
this line an hour and ten minutes. How long it was I do not know. I
"took no note of time."

We retreated from this position as our officers afterward said,
because the troops on our right had given way, and we were flanked.
Possibly those boys on our right would give the same excuse for
their leaving, and probably truly, too. Still, I think we did not