but it eased his pain, cooled the fever in his blood, and he slept! In
all that cold and pelting storm he slept!

It was broad day when he awoke. The sun was shining dimly through the
thick masses of gray clouds which floated in the sky, but the wind had
gone down, and the rain was over. The moans of the wounded still came
to him, but they were not so frequent, nor so terrible, as they were the
night before. Many had found relief from the rain, and many had ceased
moaning forever.

He could not rise, but, after long and painful effort, he succeeded in
turning over on his side. Then he had a view of the scene around him. He
lay near the summit of a gentle hill, at whose base a little brook was
flowing. At the north it was crowned with a dense growth of oaks and
pines and cedar thickets, but at the south and west it sloped away into
waving meadows and pleasant cornfields, already green with the opening
beauty of spring. Beyond the meadows were other hills, and knolls, and
rocky heights, all covered with an almost impenetrable forest, and there
the hardest fighting of those terrible days was done. A narrow road,
bordered by a worm-fence (Western boys know what a worm-fence is), wound
around the foot of the hill, and led to a large mansion standing half
hidden in a grove of oaks and elms, not half a mile away. Before this
mansion were pleasant lawns and gardens, and in its rear a score or more
of little negro houses, whose whitewashed walls were gleaming in the
sun. This was the plantation--so James afterwards learned--of Major
Lucy, one of those wicked men whose bad ambition has brought this
dreadful war on our country.

The scene was very beautiful, and, looking at it, James forgot for a
moment the darker picture, drawn in blood, on the grass around him. But
there it was. Blackened muskets, broken saddles, overturned caissons,
wounded horses snorting in agony, and fair-haired boys and gray-haired
men mangled and bleeding,--some piled in heaps, and some stretched out
singly to die,--lay all over that green hillside! Here and there a
crippled soldier was creeping about among the wounded, and, close by, a
stalwart man, the blood dripping from his dangling sleeve, was wrapping
a blue-eyed, pale-faced boy in his blanket. "Don't cry, Freddy," he
said; "ye sha'n't be cold! Yer mother'll soon be yere!" But the boy gave
no answer, for--he was dead!

"He don't hear you," said James. "He isn't cold now!"

"I'se afeard he ar',-