Drum and fife played “Dixie.” Away from the old V.M.I., coming down in ruin about them, marched the cadets. They marched to a fierce bright music, but their faces were flushed and quivering. It needed all their boy pride to keep the tears away. Lexington, anxious-hearted, saw them go. Behind them the batteries were thundering, and Hunter’s thousands were gathering like locusts. Colonel Shipp and the cadets took the Balcony Falls road—Balcony Falls first and then Lynchburg, and active service somewhere if not at Lexington.... They came to a high hill, several miles south of the town. “_Halt!_” and the two hundred and fifty halted, and resting on their pieces looked back. The Virginia Military Institute was on fire. Tower and turret, arsenal, mess hall, barracks, houses of the professors, all were burning down. Hunter made no long tarrying in Lexington. He waited but to burn the house of the Governor of Virginia and swept on toward the pass in the Blue Ridge he had in mind. His line of march brought him and his thousands into a country as yet uncharred by war. At Three Oaks there was a wounded soldier—a kinsman of Margaret Cleave’s, wounded in a skirmish in southwest Virginia and brought in an ambulance by his servant back to his native county. Here he found his own home closed; his mother gone to Richmond to nurse another son, his sister in Lynchburg with her husband. The ambulance took him on to Three Oaks, and here he had been for some days. Exposure and travel had not been good for him, and though his wound was healing, he lay in a low fever. He lay in Richard’s room, nursed by Margaret and an old, wrinkled, coloured woman. Tullius was at Three Oaks. Cleave had sent him back, months before, to be a stay to the place. Now Margaret, coming through the hall, found him on the back porch, standing on the step between the pillars like a grave old Rameses. It was a hot June day, with clouds that promised a storm. “What is it, Tullius?” asked Margaret. She took an old cane-seat chair and faced him. There were threads of grey in her hair. The old man noticed them this morning. “Miss Miriam ain’ nowhere ’roun’, is she?” “No. She is out with her book under the oaks. What is it?” “They’ve flowed over Buchanan, Miss Margaret. I done took the horse an’ went down as far as Mount Joy. I met a man an’ he say they tried to cross by the bridge, but General McCausland done burn the bridge. Hit didn’t stop ’em. They marched up the river to the ford an’ crossed, an’ come hollerin’ an’ firin’ down on the town. An’ a house by the mouth of the bridge caught an’ a heap of houses were burnin’, he say, when he left. An’ he say that some of the Yankees were those foreigners that can’t understand a word you say, an’ a lot of them were drunk. I saw the smoke an’ fire an’ heard the shoutin’. An’ then I come right home.” “Do you think that they will march this way?”