lop. Keeping back a pace or two was a matter of
necessity. The Captain was full a hundred yards ahead when he halted
near the house to give me time to get in position, his black mare
prancing and snorting under the Mexican ticklers in a manner that would
have done credit to Bucephalus. He pranced on up towards the house,
which was a long weather-boarded structure, a story and a half high,
with a porch running its entire length. The building was put up, I
should judge, before the war of 1812, and not repaired since. A crabbed
old man in a grey coat, with horn buttons, and tan-colored pantaloons,
looking as if he didn't know what to make exactly of the character of
his visitors, was on the porch. Near him, and somewhat in his rear, was
a darkie about as old as himself.

"'Won't you get off your critters?' at length said the old man, his
servant advancing to hold the horses.

"The Captain dismounted, and as his long spurs jingled, and the Major's
sabre clattered on the rotten porch floor, the old fellow changed
countenance considerably, impressed with the presence of greatness.

"'I am Major-General Franklin, sir, commander of a Grand Division of the
Grand Army of the Potomac,' pompously said the Captain, at the same time
introducing me as his Aid, Major Kennedy.

"'Well, gentlemen officers,' stammers the old man, confusedly, and
bowing repeatedly, 'I always liked the old Union. I fit for it in the
milish in the last war with the Britishers. Walk in, walk in,' continued
he, pointing to the door which the darkie had opened.

"We went into a long room with a low ceiling, dirty floor with no carpet
on, a few old chairs, with and without backs, and a walnut table that
looked as if it once had leaves. In one corner was a clock, that stopped
some time before the war commenced, as the old man afterwards told us,
and in the opposite corner stood a dirty pine cupboard. While taking
seats, I couldn't help thinking how badly the room would compare with a
dining room of one of the neat little farm houses that you can see in
any of our mountain gaps, where the land produces nothing but
grasshoppers and rocks, and the farmers have to get along by raising
chickens to keep down the swarms of grasshoppers, and by peddling
huckleberries, and they say, but I never saw them at it, by holding the
hind legs of the sheep up to let them get their noses between the rocks
for pasture."

This latter assertion was indignantly denied by an offic