pon the opposite
side,--and the skirmishing that occasionally occurred along the lines
giving promise of a fight that might centre upon their premises,--they
packed up a few valuables and left for a place of safety. But not all.
We read of noble Romans offering their lives in defence of faithful
slaves. That species of self-sacrifice is a stranger to our Southern
chivalry. In the garret of the building, upon some rags, lay an old
woman, who had been crippled from injuries received by being scalded
some months before, and had thus closed a term of faithful service which
ran over fifty years, of the life of her present master and of that of
his father before him. Worn out, and useless for further toil, she had
been placed in the garret with other household rubbish. Her poor body
crippled,--but a casket, nevertheless, of an immortal soul,--was not one
of the valuables taken by the family upon their departure. As the
thunders of the thickening fight broke in upon her loneliness, her cries
upon the God of battles, alone powerful to save, could be heard with
great distinctness. Isolated and under the fire of either line, there
was no room for human relief. Her strength of voice appeared to grow
with the increasing darkness, and above the continuous thunder of the
cannon were the cries--"God Almighty, help me!" "Lord, save me!" "Have
mercy on me!" shrieked and groaned in all the varied tones of mortal
agony. Long after the firing had ceased, in fact until we moved at
early dawn, our men behind the works and in the rifle pits in front
could hear with greater or less distinctness, as if a death wail coming
up from the carnage of the field, the piteous plaints of that
terror-stricken soul. Rumor has it, that before the building was fired
by a shell in the middle of the following forenoon, her spirit had taken
its flight; but whether or not, it could not mitigate the retributive
justice to be measured out by that God over us all to whom vengeance
belongs, upon the heads of the ingrates who had left her to her fate.

We moved, as we have before mentioned, at early dawn on one of those
fair, bright Sabbath days so happily spoken of by "good old George
Herbert;" marching by the right flank along our works, with a hurried
step. It was between five and six when we neared the front,--passing on
our way out, hosts of stragglers and disorganized regiments of the
Eleventh Corps. They had suffered badly--some said, behaved badly--and
some s