[Note: I had a similar experience some years after I wrote this paper, when I was spending the summer at Westport on Lake Champlain. Wandering far enough off into the country to lose myself--for me no unfamiliar feat--I joined a man who was driving his cows to town and in my talk with him it turned out that he had been through the Valley campaign on the other side, and together we recalled encounters and scenes that were not recorded in the histories, insignificant skirmishes--significant enough to those who were killed and maimed. Who remembers the little brush at Weyer's Cave, where the Confederates came near bagging General Merritt? I have not been allowed to forget it these fifty years.] The two old soldiers were talking amicably enough, as all old soldiers do, but they "yarned," as all old soldiers do, and though they talked from Baltimore to Philadelphia, and from Philadelphia to New York, their conversation was lost on me, for my thoughts went back into my own past, and two pictures came up to me from the time of the war. [Note: Apropos of this passage my friend and classmate of the Princeton days, Gen. BRADLEY T. JOHNSON, told me that one hot day riding to meet a fight that would make the day still hotter, he stopped at a roadside cabin and asked for a drink of water. The woman who brought it, brought it in a broken and cracked mug, and he assured me that every ramification of those cracks was indelibly impressed on his brain. He could have drawn a map of the mug. Experiences like these help us to understand the details of the Homeric narrative, and to me there is nothing unnatural in Homer's mention of the washing troughs that Hector saw as he fled before the face of Achilles (Il. 22, 154 foll.).] [Note: The fight under EARLY, to which I refer, was fought July 24, 1864. It was a brilliant feat of arms and has left other memories than those recorded. As A. D. C. to General GORDON I gave General TERRY, one of the brigade commanders, the order to advance, and I still hear the cry of one of the men who had been in a disastrous affair a few weeks before--the fight in which Gen. W. E. JONES fell. "This hain't no New Hope, Gineral." I still see the light of battle on the faces of the men as they went forward. My blood tingles as I write.]