lding
a road that ran from Nowhere to the southeast. Some of us had served
through the summer in the "three-months' regiments," which responded to
the President's first call for troops. We were regarded by the others with
profound respect as "old soldiers." (Our ages, if equalized, would, I
fancy, have given about twenty years to each man.) We gave ourselves, this
aristocracy of service, no end of military airs; some of us even going to
the extreme of keeping our jackets buttoned and our hair combed. We had
been in action, too; had shot off a Confederate leg at Philippi, "the
first battle of the war," and had lost as many as a dozen men at Laurel
Hill and Carrick's Ford, whither the enemy had fled in trying, Heaven
knows why, to get away from us. We now "brought to the task" of subduing
the Rebellion a patriotism which never for a moment doubted that a rebel
was a fiend accursed of God and the angels--one for whose extirpation by
force and arms each youth of us considered himself specially "raised up."

It was a strange country. Nine in ten of us had never seen a mountain, nor
a hill as high as a church spire, until we had crossed the Ohio River. In
power upon the emotions nothing, I think, is comparable to a first sight
of mountains. To a member of a plains-tribe, born and reared on the flats
of Ohio or Indiana, a mountain region was a perpetual miracle. Space
seemed to have taken on a new dimension; areas to have not only length and
breadth, but thickness.

Modern literature is full of evidence that our great grandfathers looked
upon mountains with aversion and horror. The poets of even the seventeenth
century never tire of damning them in good, set terms. If they had had the
unhappiness to read the opening lines of "The Pleasures of Hope," they
would assuredly have thought Master Campbell had gone funny and should be
shut up lest he do himself an injury.

The flatlanders who invaded the Cheat Mountain country had been suckled in
another creed, and to them western Virginia--there was, as yet, no West
Virginia--was an enchanted land. How we reveled in its savage beauties!
With what pure delight we inhaled its fragrances of spruce and pine! How
we stared with something like awe at its clumps of laurel!--real laurel,
as we understood the matter, whose foliage had been once accounted
excellent for the heads of illustrious Romans and such--mayhap to reduce
the swelling. We carved its roots into fingerrings and pipes. We g