The air was like wine and the troops were in spirits. There were huge jokes, laughter, singing, and when at noon the column halted in a coloured wood for dinner, the men frisked among the trees like young lambs or very fauns of Pan. They were ragged, and they didn’t have much for dinner, but gaiety was in their gift and a quite superb “make the best of it.” They were filled with quips and cranks; they guffawed with laughter. They lay upon the earth, hands beneath their heads, one knee crossed above the other, and sang to the red oak leaves on the topmost branch. “I dreamed a dream the other night, When everything was still;— I dreamed I saw Susannah Come running down the hill.... “O Susannah, don’t you weep, Nor mourn too long for me— I’se gwine to Alabama, With my banjo on my knee!” “Old Grimes is dead, that good old man, Whom we shall see no more—” The Sixty-fifth Virginia’s spirits flew in feathers. The Sixty-fifth was, for this period of the war and on the Southern side, a full regiment. It carried nearly five hundred muskets. It was practically half as large as it had been on the day of First Manassas. It had passed through three years of deadly war, but as a regiment it possessed skill as well as courage, and—with one exception—it had had fair luck. And then it had gathered recruits. It was a good regiment to belong to—a steady, fine regiment. Officers’ mess spread its table on the golden, fallen leaves of a hickory beside a sliding, ice-cool rivulet. The four hundred and odd men were scattered, in perhaps fifty messes, through the grove. The smoke of their fires rose straight and blue. The metal of the stacked muskets reflected a thousand little saffron flames. The leaves drifted down. The day was ineffably sweet, cool, and fragrant. _Caw! caw!_ went the crows in a neighbouring field.