ther the General was forced to retire
under a storm of all kinds of dog-calls, swelled in volume by the
adjacent Regiments.

That authority should be thus abused by the General in endeavoring to
enforce his ridiculous order, and set at naught by the men in thus
mocking at obedience, is to be deprecated. The men took that method of
rebuking the inconsistency, which would permit Regular and many
Volunteer Regiments to be followed by all manner of dogs,

"Both mongrel, puppy, whelp and hound,
And cur of low degree,"

and yet refuse them the accidental company of but a brace of canines. A
simple report of the offender, supposing the Sergeant to have been one,
would have been the proper course, and would have saved a General of
Division the disgrace of being made a laughing-stock for his command.

"Talent is something: but tact is everything," said an eminent man, and
nowhere has the remark a more truthful application than in the army.

A favorite employment after the evening halt, during this three days'
march, was the gathering of mushrooms. The old fields frequent along the
route abounded with them, and many a royal meal they furnished. To
farmers' sons accustomed to the sight of close cultivation, these old
fields, half covered with stunted pines, sassafras, varieties of spice
wood, and the never-failing persimmon tree, were objects of curiosity.
It was hard to realize that we were marching through a country once
considered the Garden of America, whose bountiful supplies and large
plantations had become classic through the pen of an Irving and other
famous writers. Fields princely in size, but barren as Sahara;
buildings, once comfortable residences, but now tottering into ruin, are
still there, but "all else how changed." The country is desolation
itself. Game abounds, but whatever required the industry of man for its
continuance has disappeared.

Civilization, which in younger States has felled forests, erected
school-houses, given the fertility of a garden to the barren coast of
the northern Atlantic and the wild-wood of the West, could not coalesce
with the curse of slavery, and Virginia has been passed by in her onward
march. This field of pines that you see on our right, whose tops are so
dense and even as to resemble at a distance growing grain, may have been
an open spot over which Washington followed his hounds in
ante-revolutionary days. The land abounds in memories. The very names of