The sun peeps lovingly down even on many a battle-field, and it kisses the tips of bayonets soon to be wet with the blood of brothers and the blades of swords that are to be hacked and hammered in deadly conflict, just as it might glint upon the polished barrel of the sportsman or flash from the diamond aigrette of the lady riding forth on her white palfrey to catch the breath of early morning. And how man, with the capacity of thought, shrinks and shrivels within himself when he marks the eternity of the course of nature and the very silent scorn bestowed upon him when he is committing crimes or displaying heroisms that make all _his_ little world one overwhelming convulsion! It was the reply of an officer of undaunted bravery, when asked what was the predominant feeling in his mind when he headed the forlorn-hope in one of the desperate assaults that preceded the taking of the City of Mexico: "I think I heard the singing of the birds in the trees, more distinctly than anything else, and I felt a little vexed that they seemed to care nothing about the terrible scrape we were pitching into." And something of the same dissatisfaction, though more tinged with melancholy, has been felt by many who stood beside the closing grave and heard the same bird-music making harsh discord with the rumbling of the clods falling on the lid of the coffin, and who saw the pleasant sunshine tinging the very sods that were in a few moments to form an impassable barrier between the beloved dead and the miserable living. Nature smiled upon the field of Malvern, on the morning of the First of July, however the powers that wheel the courses of the sun may have frowned behind their battlements at the sacrifice of life then beginning and the fearful passions then being called into more active exertion. A slight mist lay over wood and river, in the very early morning, but the first beams of the sun dispelled it, and the picturesque Virginia landscape was exposed to full view, with its long stretches of hill and plain, its river glimmering in the distance, its patches of corn and tobacco, its scattered and unthrifty farm-houses flanked with their negro quarters, and its long lines of white and sun-baked roads.