agate-pointed stylus, a dispatch and its copy were written at once, and a valuable record kept of every day's business. I could sit by the bivouac fire and write upon my knee without troubling a weary aide-de-camp to make a copy. I had in my saddle portmanteau also a little pair of brass candlesticks screwing together in form of a large watch-case, so that I could be provided with a light at the root of a tree in the darkness, if it was necessary to send or receive dispatches where there was neither shelter nor fire. These were necessaries; for food we could take our chances. We halted the troops in wooded slopes where they were sheltered from the storm and where the evergreen boughs were speedily converted into tents of a sort, as well as soft and fragrant beds. Their ration was still scant, but nearly all of them picked up some addition to it on a day's march, so that the camps were more cheerful than they had been in the intensely severe weather of the first half of the month. On the next day we continued the movement, passing through Strawberry Plains and three miles further on the road to Knoxville. The Fourth Corps troops were ordered to go to the last-named city, there to cross the Holston and move out toward Sevierville into the country we had expected to reach by way of Dandridge. The Ninth Corps remained a little longer at Strawberry Plains. On the 18th of January General Foster's plans were unsettled by a dispatch received from General Grant, dated at Nashville on the 16th, but in some manner delayed in transmittal. This conveyed the rather startling information that Longstreet had been reinforced by a division of Ewell's Corps with expectation of another also, and that the Confederate commander was in fact moving in force on Knoxville. [Footnote: Official Records, vol. xxxii. pt. ii. pp. 109, 127.] The source of the information is not disclosed, but the news was stated with a positiveness uncommon with Grant. It reached Foster just as he had Parke's report of our having most unexpectedly met Longstreet's infantry at Dandridge and of our retreat on Strawberry Plains. The news was without foundation, for Longstreet had not been reinforced and his movement had no other significance than that which I have given it; but, coming on the heels of the accidental collision at Dandridge, there was a curious coincidence in the events which gave strong apparent confirmation to the report, and it was a matter of course that Foster should accept it as true and act upon it.