Thanks are due to Mr. Richard Thorndyke Smith for the loan of his copy of a slender and now extremely rare work which at this moment lies before me. "A History of Kincaid's Battery," it is called, "From Its Origin to the Present Day," although it runs only to February, '62, and was printed (so well printed, on such flimsy, coarse paper) just before the dreadful days of Shiloh and the fall of New Orleans.

Let us never paint war too fair; but this small volume tells of little beyond the gold-laced year of 'Sixty-one, nor of much beyond Virginia, even over whose later war-years the color effects of reminiscence show blue and green and sun-lit despite all the scarlet¹ of carnage, the black and crimson² of burning, and the grim hues³ of sickness, squalor, and semi-starvation; show green and blue in the sunlight of victory, contrasted with those of the states west and south of her.

It tells--this book compiled largely from correspondence of persons well known to you and me--of the first "eight-days' crawl" that conveyed the chaffing, chafing⁴ command up through Mississippi, across East Tennessee into southeast Virginia and so on through Lynchburg to lovely Richmond; tells how never a house was passed in town or country but handkerchiefs, neckerchiefs, snatched-off sunbonnets, and Confederate flags wafted⁵ them on. It tells of the uncounted railway stations where swarmed⁶ the girls in white muslin aprons⁷ and red-white-and-red bows, who waved them, in as they came, and unconsciously squinted⁸ and made faces at them in the intense sunlight. It tells how the maidens⁹ gave them dainties and sweet glances, and boutonnières of tuberoses and violets, and bloodthirsty adjurations, and blarney for blarney; gave them seven wild well-believed

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