I had come to talk with Will, but our conversation was obliged to be deferred. The brave boys of the horse artillery, officers and men, gathered round to hear the news from Petersburg; and it was a rare pleasure to me to see again the old familiar faces. Around me, in light of the camp-fire, were grouped the tigers who had fought with Pelham, in the old battles of Stuart. Here were the heroes of a hundred combats; the men who had held their ground desperately in the most desperate encounters--the bulldogs who had showed their teeth and sprung to the death-grapple at Cold Harbor, Manassas, Sharpsburg, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, Fleetwood, Gettysburg, in the Wilderness, at Trevillian’s, at Sappony, in a thousand bitter conflicts with the cavalry. Scarred faces, limping bodies, the one-armed, the one-legged,--these I saw around me; the frames slashed and mutilated, but the eyes flashing and full of fight, as in the days when Pelham thundered, loosing his war-hounds on the enemy. I had seen brave commands, in these long years of combat--had touched the hands of heroic men, whose souls fear never entered--but I never saw braver fighters than the horse artillery--soldiers more reckless than Pelham’s bloodhounds. They went to battle laughing. There was something of the tiger in them. They were of every nation nearly--Frenchmen, Irishmen, Italians,--but one sentiment seemed to inspire them--hatred of our friends over the way. From the moment in 1862, when at Barbee’s they raised the loud resounding _Marseillaise_, while fighting the enemy in front and rear, to this fall of 1864, when they had strewed a hundred battle-fields with dead men and horses, these “swarthy old hounds” of the horse artillery had vindicated their claims to the admiration of Stuart;--in the thunder of their guns, the dead chieftain had seemed still to hurl his defiance at the invaders of Virginia. Looking around me, I missed many of the old faces, sleeping now beneath the sod. But Dominic, Antonio, and Rossini were still there--those members of the old “Napoleon Detachment” of Pelham’s old battery; there still was Guillemot, the erect, military-looking Frenchman,--Guillemot, with his hand raised to his cap, saluting me with the profoundest respect; these were the faces I had seen a hundred times, and never any thing but gay and full of fight. Doubtless they remembered me, and thought of Stuart, as others had done, at seeing me. They gave me a soldier’s welcome; soon, from the group around the camp-fire rose a song. Another followed, then another, in the richest tenor; and the forests of Dinwiddie rang with the deep voices, rising clear and sonorous in the moonlight night. They were old songs of Ashby and Stuart; unpublished ditties of the struggle, which the winds have borne away into the night of the past, and which now live only in memory. There was one of Ashby, commencing,-- “See him enter on the valley,” which wound up with the words,--