“Amen! amen!” responded a dozen voices, with an emphasis that would have done credit to a clerk in a country church, and I am certain with a better inclination for the desired object. Tracy laid himself at his length once more, and after recapitulating their different losses, and the good qualities of their fallen comrades, but taking care not to mention any of their bad ones, every man gradually relaxed into a sleep, from which nothing could arouse him, save the sound of the bugles, or the hard cracking of the rifle, which ever brings the soldier on his legs again, ready to advance or retreat, or as the night closed over the column, to lament or be lamented, as one of the fallen or absent messmates. Those unacquainted with a camp-fire, after a hard-fought battle, can have little idea of its true sublimity, while leaning on my rifle, surveying the scene at this dead hour of night; it impressed me with more awe than any that I had before witnessed. Here I stood, as it were, a solitary sentinel in the midst of twenty thousand men, yet so silent, you might have thought yourself secreted within the walls of a cloister; while, by the moon, now and then hiding itself behind a cloud, might be observed the faint light of the French out-post fires that occasionally caught the eye like meteors. Again emerging from her mantle, by her clear light might here and there be seen the dead bodies of French soldiers, not yet interred, ever distinguished by their large red shoulder-knots. Turning the eye to my comrades, whose happy repose I envied, might be seen blood oozing from the furrow made by a French bullet, while the perforated cap lay beside its owner. How sweet is the soldier sleep when such repose is earned by the fatigue of eighteen hours hard fighting. That gave each man a double relish for repose, knowing it was his own courage gained the spot of ground on which he laid. The crackling of the fires soon ceased for want of fuel, and nothing remained but the embers; the whole camp was as still as the grave; nothing to disturb the soldiers’ repose, but the casual braying of the donkeys, that answered each other from camp to camp, and gradually died away in the echo of the distant woods. I quietly walked round the fires to see that none of the men’s pouches were near it; but, no—there was each man with his rifle loaded, and leaning on his arm, close to his breast, hugged with all the affection a fond lover would press to his bosom the girl of his heart—this was our usual custom, as riflemen seldom pile arms; yet with all, I never knew an accident to occur by the rifles going off.