Thursday morning, Price and McCulloch were reported to be actually advancing on Springfield. Lyon’s troops were quickly in line of battle, the luggage wagons were all sent to the center of the town, and in this position they remained during nearly the entire day. The Southern troops _had_ advanced, but only about two miles, and had gone into camp in the southern part of this county, nearly on the line between Greene and Christian counties (in sections 25 and 36, tp. 28, range 23, partly in Greene and partly in Christian county), their tents being on either side of Wilson’s Creek, and extending a mile or so east and south of the Fayetteville road. Thursday evening the Federals were ready for marching orders, but a portion of the Kansas troops had been so much engaged the night before as to be really unfit for service, and an order for all of the soldiers, except those actually on guard, to retire and rest, was issued, and the night attack was again deferred. The Home Guards were on duty and in active service in the city at this time. And so the soldiers lay down to rest and to sleep—to many of them it was to be the last repose they should take until they should lie down to take their last sleep. Soon the camps were wrapped in silence and slumber and no sound was to be heard save the cry of the night birds and the challenges of the watchful pickets as they hailed the relief guard, or arrested the steps of some belated wanderer. There they lay, these men from Iowa and Kansas, dreaming of the homes and loved ones they had left behind them on the beautiful prairies of their own States, and in vision seeing faces and forms and scenes they were destined to never see again in reality. There they lay, these bearded Germans from St. Louis, dreaming, perhaps, of families and kinsmen in the city by the great river, or of their early homes in the Fatherland, far across the deep, blue sea. There they lay, these Missouri Unionists, sleeping as peacefully as their brethren in arms. There they lay, too, only a few miles away, those men under the folds of the new flag, who had come out from their homes by the bayous of Louisiana, on the plains of Texas, amid the hills and dales and valleys of Arkansas and Missouri, to do battle for the cause they believed to be just and righteous, to drive out those whom they believed to be the wrongful invaders of their country, the despoilers of their homes. And to blue and gray alike, with an equal peace and softness, came that balmy blessing which “knits up the raveled sleeve of care.”