It is apropos the battlefield that I mention the peculiarities of the soil. Had the bare ground been exposed to the rains of a few years, the details of redoubts, trenches, gun positions, saps, and all other military works would have melted away. Fortunately, however, there is a kind of tough, strong-rooted grass, called Bermuda grass, indigenous to that part of the country, and this grass quickly covered the battlefield, holding the soil together so effectually that all outlines are practically embalmed. So, although those in charge of the park have contributed not a little to its preservation--putting old guns in their former places, perpetuating saps with concrete work, and placing white markers on the hillsides, to show how far up those hillsides the assaulting Union troops made their way in various historic charges--it is due most of all to Nature that the Vicksburg battlefield so well explains itself. Could Grant and Pemberton look to-day upon the hills and valleys where surged their six weeks' struggle for possession of the city, I doubt that they would find any important landmark wanting, and it is certain that they could not say, as Wellington did when he revisited Waterloo: "They have spoiled my battlefield!" Besides the old guns and the markers, the field is dotted over with observation towers and all manner of memorials. Of the latter, the marble pantheon erected by the State of Illinois, and the beautiful marble and bronze memorial structure of the State of Iowa, are probably the finest. The marble column erected by Wisconsin carries at its summit a great bronze effigy of "Old Abe," the famous eagle, mascot of the Wisconsin troops. Guides to the battlefield are prone to relate to visitors--especially, I suspect, those whose accents betray a Northern origin--how "Old Abe," the bird of battle, went home and disgraced himself, after the war, by his ungentlemanly action in laying a setting of eggs. The handsomest monument to an individual which I saw upon the battlefield was the admirable bronze bust of Major General Martin L. Smith, C.S.A., and the one which appealed most to my imagination was also a memorial to a Confederate soldier: Brigadier-General States Rights Gist. Is there not something Roman in the thought that, thirty or more years before the war, a southern father gave his new-born son that name, dedicating him, as it were, to the cause of States Rights, and that the son so dedicated gave his life in battle for that cause? The name upon that stone made me better understand the depth of feeling that existed in the South long years before the War, and gave me a clearer comprehension of at least one reason why the South made such a gallant fight. * * * * *