For the time we were, however, as has been said, enjoying the cream of army life. The nights were chilly, though the days were hot and the clay roads dusty. The mornings were glorious with their bracing fresh air, their blue mists clinging about far-off Lookout Mountain, and even hiding the top of Waldron's Ridge at our backs, and their bright sunshine, which came flooding over the distant heights of Georgia and North Carolina. The wagon-tracks winding among the low, mound-like hills which filled the valley from the base of the ridge to the river were as smooth and gravelly as a well-kept private roadway, and an ambulance-ride along their tortuous courses was a most enjoyable recreation in those fine September days of 1863. A gallop twenty miles up the valley to where Minty kept watch and ward upon our flank with his trusty horsemen; a dinner at that hospitable mess-table, furnished maybe with a pig which had strayed from its home not wholly through natural perversity; and then a lively ride back in the early evening,--this, indeed, was pleasure. The charm of campaigning is its rapidly-succeeding surprises. The general of the army may be proceeding regularly in the path he marked out months before. The corps commanders, and even the chiefs of division, may sometimes be able to foresee the movements from day to day. But to their subordinates everything is a surprise: they lie down at night in delightful uncertainty as to where the next sunset will find them, and they sit down to a breakfast of hard bread and bacon, relieved by a little foraging from the country, not sure that their coffee will cool before the bugle sounds a signal to pack and be off, to Heaven knows where. We found this charm of surprise, as we had hundreds of times before in other places, at our camp in the valley of the Tennessee. The alternating quick and droning notes of "the general" made us spring up from the mess-table one morning, and in a moment the lazy encampment was all hurry and bustle. An aide leaped upon his horse at head-quarters and dashed off on the road to the river, and we saw that the servants of General Hazen, our brigade commander, were stripping his baggage of the small impedimenta which accumulate so rapidly even in a few days of rest, but are abandoned when the army starts on an active campaign. It was not to be a mere change of camp, evidently, but a final adieu to the locality and a dash over the Tennessee--if we could make it.