That little scheme of our long-range guns on the hill behind, firing over our heads at the enemy acted very well, for a while. It came to have its very decided inconvenience to _us_, as well as to the enemy. When the Federal infantry had retired, those guns turned their fire on the Federal artillery which was hammering us. They meant to divert their attention, and do us a good turn. They had better have left us to "the ills we had." Their line of fire, at that artillery, was exactly over our position. Very soon their shells got tired travelling over, and began to stop _with us_. Our Confederate shells were often very badly made, the weight in the conical shells not well balanced. And so, very often, instead of going quietly, point foremost, like decent shells, where they were _aimed_, they would get to _tumbling_, that is, going end over end, or "swappin' ends" as the Tar Heels used to describe it, and _then_, there was no telling _where_ they would go, except that they would _certainly go wrong_. And, they went very wrong, indeed, on this occasion, in our opinion. The sound of a tumbling Parrott shell in full flight, is the most horrible noise that ever was heard!--a wild, venomous, fiendish scream, that makes every fellow, in half a mile of it, feel that it is looking for _him particularly_, and _certain_ that it's _going to get him_. I believe it would have made Julius Caesar, himself, "go for a tree," or want to, anyhow! Well! these blood-curdlers came crashing into us, from the rear, knocking up clouds of dirt, digging great holes, bursting, and raining fragments around us in the field. We were not firing, and had leisure to realize the fix we were in. With the enemy hotly shelling us from the front, and our friends from the rear, obliged to stay by our guns, expecting an infantry assault every minute, we certainly were in a pretty tight fix, "'Tween the devil and the deep sea." It was the only time I ever saw Lieutenant Anderson excited under fire, but he was excited _now_, and mad too. He said to one of the fellows, "Go back under the hill, get on a horse, ride as hard as you can, and tell those men on the hill, what confounded work they are doing, and if they fire any more shells, here, I will open on them immediately." In a few minutes it was stopped, with many regrets on the part of our friends. =The Narrow Escape of an Entire Company=