odel chaplain till his labors and
exposure broke his health and forced him to resign. The presence of
two such men gave some hours of refined social life in the intervals
of rough work. One evening walk along the Kanawha has ever since
remained in my memory associated with Whittier's poem "The River
Path," as a wilder and more brilliant type of the scene he pictured.
We had walked out beyond the camp, leaving its noise and its warlike
associations behind us, for a turn of the road around a jutting
cliff shut it all out as completely as if we had been transported to
another land, except that the distant figure of a sentinel on post
reminded us of the limit of safe sauntering for pleasure. My
Presbyterian and Episcopalian friends forgot their differences of
dogma, and as the sun dropped behind the mountain tops, making an
early twilight in the valley, we talked of home, of patriotism, of
the relation of our struggle to the world's progress, and other high
themes, when

"Sudden our pathway turned from night,
The hills swung open to the light;
Through their green gates the sunshine showed,
A long, slant splendor downward flowed.
Down glade and glen and bank it rolled;
It bridged the shaded stream with gold;
And borne on piers of mist, allied
The shadowy with the sunlit side!"

The surroundings, the things of which we talked, our own sentiments,
all combined to make the scene stir deep emotions for which the
poet's succeeding lines seem the only fit expression, and to link
the poem indissolubly with the scene as if it had its birth there.

When Wise had retreated from the valley, Colonel Tompkins had been
unable to remove his family, and had left a letter commending them
to our courteous treatment. Mrs. Tompkins was a lady of refinement,
and her position within our outposts was far from being a
comfortable one. She, however, put a cheerful face upon her
situation, showed great tact in avoiding controversy with the
soldiers and in conciliating the good-will of the officers, and
remained with her children and servants in her picturesque home on
the mountain. So long as there was no fighting in the near vicinity,
it was comparatively easy to save her from annoyance; but when a
little later in the autumn Floyd occupied Cotton Mountain, and
General Rosecrans was with us with larger forces, such a household
became an object of suspicion and ill-will, which made it necessary
to send her through the li