Beside the unmistakable migrants,--white-throats, white-crowns, and black-polls,--there were numbers of more southern birds in the national cemetery. Among them I noticed a yellow-billed cuckoo, crow blackbirds, orchard orioles, summer tanagers, catbirds, a thrasher, a bluebird, wood pewees, chippers, blue-gray gnatcatchers, yellow warblers, wood thrushes, and chats. All these looked sufficiently at home except the chats; and it helps to mark the exceeding abundance of these last in the Chattanooga region that they should show themselves without reserve in a spot so frequented and so wanting in close cover. One of the orioles sang in the manner of a fox sparrow, while one that sang daily under my window, on Cameron Hill, never once suggested that bird, but often the purple finch. The two facts offer a good idea of this fine songster's quality and versatility. The organ tones of the yellow-throated vireo and the minor whistle of the wood pewee were sweetly in harmony with the spirit of the place, a spirit hard fully and exactly to express, a mingling of regret and exultation. What mattered it that all these men had perished, as it seemed, before their time?--that so many of them were lying in nameless graves? We shall all die; few of us so worthily; and when we are gone, of what use will be a name upon a stone, a name which, after a few years at the most, no passer-by will be concerned to read? Happy is he who dies to some purpose. It would have been good, I thought, to see over the cemetery gate the brave old Latin sentence, _Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori_. The human visitors, of whom one day there might have been a hundred, were largely people of color. All were quiet and orderly, in couples and family groups. Most of them, I remarked, went to look at the only striking monument in the grounds, a locomotive and tender (the "General") on a pedestal of marble--"Ohio's Tribute to the Andrews Raiders, 1862." On three faces of the pedestal are lists of the "exchanged," the "executed," and the "escaped." One thing, one only, grated upon my feelings. In a corner of the inclosure is the Superintendent's house, with a stable and out-buildings; and at the gate the visitor is suddenly struck in the face with this notice in flaring capitals: KEEP OUT! THIS MEANS YOU! That is brutality beyond excuse. But perhaps it answers its purpose. For my own part, I got out of the neighborhood as quickly as possible. I liked better the society of the graves; at such a price a dead soldier was better than a live superintendent; and to take the unpleasant taste out of my mouth I stopped to read again a stanza on one of the metal tablets set at intervals along the driveway:-- "On Fame's eternal camping ground Their silent tents are spread, And Glory guards, with solemn round, The bivouac of the dead." Far be the day when these Southern fields of Northern graves shall fall into forgetfulness and neglect. AN AFTERNOON BY THE RIVER.