The Sixty-fifth believed in friendship. It believed in cousins. It believed in the tie of the County. The river, winding between willow and sycamore from croft to croft,—the chain of little valleys, the end of one touching the beginning of another,—the linked hills, each with its homestead,—the mountains with their mountain cabins,—all was so much framework in and over and about which flowed the mutual life. In its consciousness hill called to hill and stream to stream—Thunder Run to other runs and creeks—other mountains to Thunder Run Mountain. The Sixty-fifth experienced a profound unity—a unity bred of many things. Physical contiguity played its part, a common range of ideas, a general standard of conduct, a shared way of seeing, hearing, tasting. Upon all was the stamp of community in effort, community in danger, community in event. It was not to the erection of separateness that brothers, cousins, friends, acquaintances, even in a minor degree enemies, shared heat and cold, the burning sun or the midnight, stumbling darkness of the road, storm and fatigue and waking through the night, hunger, thirst, marchings and battles and the sight of battle-fields, that their hearts together failed, shrivelled, darkened, or expanded, rose and shouted. So deeply alike now was their environment and the face of their days that their own faces were grown strangely alike. Sometimes the members of the Sixty-fifth differed in opinion, sometimes they squabbled, sometimes they waxed sarcastic, sometimes they remarked that the world was too small for such or such a comrade and themselves. Then came the battle—and when in the morning light they saw such or such an one, it was “Hello, Jim—or Jack—or Tom! I’m right down glad you weren’t killed! Fuss at you sometimes, but I’d have missed you, all the same!” The Sixty-fifth sat cross-legged in the coloured wood near Rappahannock, and ate its diminutive corn-pone and diminutive rasher of bacon. No Confederate soldier ever felt drowsily heavy after dinner. Where there was so little to digest, the process accomplished itself in the turn of a hand. There was little, too, to smoke, now—worse luck! But there was always—except in the very worst straits—there was always something out of which might be gotten a certain whimsical amusement.