Knowing you to be a connoisseur in horse-flesh, my boy, it is but proper I should tell you that I have leased my steed, the gothic Pegasus, for a few days to an army carpenter, that gentleman having expressed a wish to use my architectural animal as a model for some new barracks. Pegasus, my boy, when viewed lengthwise, presents a perspective not unlike a Hoboken cottage, and eminent builders tell me that his back is the very beau ideal of a combination roof. I sent a side-view photograph of the fiery stallion to a venerable grandmother not long since, and she wrote back that she was glad to see I had my quarters elevated on piles to avoid dampness, but should think the hut would smoke with such a crooked chimney! The old lady is rather hard of hearing, my boy, and makes trifling mistakes without her spectacles.
In the absence of my war-horse I hired a respectable hack to take me to Manassas, the driver saying that he would not charge me more than ten dollars an hour, as he had seen better days himself. What his seeing better days had to do with me I didn't exactly see, my boy; but I hired the chariot, and we went down the river at a pace sometimes achieved by that carriage in a funeral which contains the parents of the deceased.
Wet towels, soda-water, and a few wholesome kicks in the rear having rendered Company 3, Regiment 5, Mackerel Brigade, sufficiently certain of their legs to march a polka in the space of an ordinary corn field, Captain Villiam Brown placed himself at their head, and, flanked by a canteen and an adjutant, the combined pageant was just about to move on a reconnoitering expedition as I came up.
"Ha!" said Villiam, hastily placing his shirt-frill over the neck of a bottle that accidentally peeped from his bosom—"I am about to lead these noble beings on the path of glory, and you shall participate in the beams."
Without a word, I turned his left wing; and as the band, which consisted of a fat Dutchman and a night-key bugle, struck up "Drops of Brandy," we moved onward, like the celestial vision of childhood's dream.
Like the radiance of a higher heaven streaming through the golden-tinted windows of some grand old cathedral, fell the softened light of that April afternoon, on budding Nature, as we halted before a piece of woods just this side of Strasburg. On the new leaves of the trees in front of us the sunshine coined a thousand phantom cataracts of specie, and in the vale below us a delicate purple shadow wrestled with the hill-reflected fire of the sun. Deep silence fell on Company 3, Regiment 5, Mackerel Brigade; the band put his instrument on the ring with the key of his trunk, and Villiam softly reconnoitred through a spy-glass furnished with a cork. Suddenly the tones of a rich, manly voice swelled up from the bosom of the valley.
"Hush!" says Villiam, sternly eyeing the band, who had just hiccupped—"'tis the song of the Contrabands."
We all listened, and could distinctly hear the following words of the singer:
"They're holding camp-meeting in Hickory Swamp,"