had not been so hard! Here, when
she stood in the centre of it all, the old feelings of awe returned, and
the real world, the world that she had known before this day, swung
farther and farther away.

There was still but little noise, for those who yet lived were silent,
waiting patiently, and the vast peace was more powerful in its
impression upon the mind than any tumult could have been. Helen looked
up once at the skies. They were black and overcast. But few stars
twinkled there. It was a fit canopy for the Wilderness, the gloomy
forest that bore such a burden. From a far point in the southwest came
the low rumble of thunder, and lightning, like the heat-lightning of a
summer night, glimmered fitfully. Then there was a faint, sullen sound,
the report of a distant cannon shot. Helen started, more in anger than
terror. Would they fight again at such a time? She felt blame for both,
but the shot was not repeated then. A signal gun, she thought, and went
on, unconsciously going where the strong young figure of Lucia
Catherwood led the way. She heard presently another distant cannon shot,
its solemn echoes rolling all around the horizon, but she paid no heed
to it. Her mind was now for other things.

An inky sky overhung the battlefield and all it held. Those nights in
the Wilderness were among the blackest in both ways this country has
ever known. Brigades and batteries moving in the dense scrub, seeking
better places for the fresh battle on the morrow, wandered sometimes
through each other's lines. Soldiers, not knowing whether they were
among friends or enemies, and not caring, drank in the darkness from the
same streams, and, overpowered by fatigue, North and South alike often
slept a soundless sleep under trees not fifty yards from one another;
but the two Generals, who were the supreme expression of the genius of
either side, never slept. They had met for the first time; each nearly
always a victor before, neither had now won. The result yet to come lay
hidden in the black Wilderness, and by smoking camp-fires they planned
for the next day, knowing well that they would meet again in a combat
fiercer, longer and deadlier than ever, the one always seeking to drive
on, the other always seeking to hold him back.

The Wilderness enclosed many secrets that night, hiding dead and living
alike. Many of the fallen lay unseen amid the ravines and hollows, and
the burning forest was their funeral pyre. Never did the Wilderne