In my delight at finding Missionary Ridge so happy a hunting-ground for an opera-glass naturalist, I went thither again the very next morning. This time some Virginia veterans were in the car (they all wore badges), and when we had left it, and were about separating,--after a bit of talk about the battle, of course,--one of them, with almost painful scrupulosity, insisted upon assuring me that if the thing were all to be done over again, he should do just as before. One of his comrades, seeing me a Northerner, interrupted him more than once in a vain attempt to smooth matters over. They had buried the hatchet, he said; let bygones be bygones. But the first man was not to be cajoled with a phrase. He spoke without passion, with no raising of the voice, quite simply and amicably: he too accepted the result; the thing never _would_ be done over again; only let his position be understood,--he had nothing to take back. It was impossible not to respect such conscientiousness. For my own part, at any rate, I felt no prompting to argue against it, being sufficiently "opinionated" to appreciate a difficulty which some obstinate people experience in altering their convictions as circumstances change, or accepting the failure of a cause as proof of its injustice. If a man is not _too_ obstinate, to be sure, time and the course of events may bring him new light; but that is another matter. Once, when the men were talking among themselves, I overheard one say, as he pointed down the hill, "The Rebels were there, and the Union men yonder." That careless recurrence of the word "Rebel" came to me as a surprise. The principal excitement of the morning was a glimpse of a Kentucky warbler, a bird most peculiarly desired. I had finished my jaunt, and was standing beside the bramble patch not far from the railway, where I had seen the hooded warbler the day before, when the splendid creature flashed into sight, saw me, uttered a volley of quick, clear notes, and vanished up the hillside. I ran after him, but might as well have remained where I was. "He _is_ a beauty!" I find written in my notebook. And so he is, clothed in lustrous olive and the most gorgeous of yellows with trimmings of black, all in the best of taste, with nothing patchy, nothing fantastic or even fanciful. I was again impressed with the abundance of chats, indigo-birds, and white-eyed vireos. Bachman sparrows were numerous, also, in appropriate localities,--dry and bushy,--and I noted a bluebird, a yellow-throated vireo, and, shouting from a dead treetop, a great crested flycatcher.