As always, eve-of-battle, there was going on a certain redding up. Those who had haversacks plunged deep within them, gathered certain trifles together and tied them into a small bundle with a pencilled direction. Diaries were brought up very neatly and carefully to date. Entries closed with “Battle to-morrow!” or with “This time to-morrow night much will have happened”; or sometimes with such things as “Made up my quarrel with Wilson to-day”; or “Returned the book I borrowed from Selden”; or “Read a psalm and a chapter to-day”; or “Wrote home.” Eve-of-battle saw many letters written. There was a habit, too, of destroying letters received and garnered. Here and there a man sat upon a log and tore into little bits old, treasured sheets. The flecks lay like snow upon the earth of the Wilderness. “We’re tired of war on the old camp-ground Many are dead and gone.... “We’re tenting to-night on the old camp-ground,... Tenting to-night, tenting to-night. Tenting to-night on the old camp-ground.” All the spirit of this army was graver than it had been a year ago, than it had been six months ago. During the past winter a strong religious fervour had swept it. This evening, in the Wilderness, in many a command there was prayer and singing of hymns. Swaths of earth, black copses of cedar and gum, divided one congregation from another. One was singing while another prayed; the hymns were different, but the wide night had room for all—for the hymns and for “Tenting to-night,” and for the “Marseillaise” which now Hays’s Louisianians were singing. All blended into something piteous, something old and touching, and of a dim nobility. The pickets out in the deep night listened. “Just as I am, without one plea Save that thy blood was shed for me, And that Thou bid’st me come to thee, O Lamb of God, I come, I come!” A soldier, standing picket and hearing the singing behind a dusky wave of earth, had his doubts. “If we really come to him—if the Yankees over there really came to him—if we both came, why,—there _wouldn’t be any battle to-morrow_.... Seeing that he said, ‘Love your enemy’—which if everybody did presently there’d be no enemy—no more than an icicle in the sun.” He sighed and shifted his musket. “They think they mean what they’re singing, but they don’t—” Relieved, he sought his mess and the corner of leaves and boughs in which they meant to sleep. Before lying down he spoke to the man next him. “John, I’ve got a letter and a little bit of package here that I want you to keep. I am going to be killed to-morrow.” “No, you ain’t!” “Yes, I am. I am positively certain of it. I am going to be killed about noon.” “You’ve just got one of those darned presentiments, and half the time they don’t come to nothing!”