ASHBY AND JACKSON.
As hard as the service was, I am glad to have had the opportunity of sharing it with such a man as Turner Ashby. He was then a colonel of cavalry. Mounted on his milk white steed, with the form of an athlete; coal black hair, a silky brown beard reaching nearly to his waist and a velvety, steel-grey eye, he was, in soul as well as body, an ideal cavalier. His command embraced some of the best blood of Virginia and he and they were fit types of the Old South, worthy representatives of a civilization, that in culture, courtesy and courage, in honor and in honesty, the past had never equalled and the future will never repeat.
Jackson had not then developed the military genius that afterwards rendered him so famous. The campaign furnished but little field for generalship, but it gave evidence of one trait in his character—to halt at no obstacle in the accomplishment of a purpose to benefit the cause for which he fought. In personal appearance and bearing he and Ashby differed widely. Without grace as a rider, and indifferently mounted, there was nothing in his appearance to indicate or foreshadow the height to which he afterwards attained. And yet I can but cherish with pride the recollection that in this campaign I had the privilege of serving under one, who in the blood-stained years that followed "went down to a soldier's grave with the love of the whole world, and the name of Stonewall Jackson."