To mark Waterloo the Belgians reared a mound of huge dimensions, scraping the _terrain_ far and near to obtain the earth. Wellington is said to have remarked that the features of the ground had been so far obliterated by this that he could not recognise his own positions. One wonders whether the future may not blame our generation for transformations almost as disguising. Gettysburg, Chickamauga, Vicksburg, and Shiloh are now elaborate parks. No mounds have been reared, but the old roads are smooth boulevards, trim lawns are on the ragged heights, the landscape-gardener has barbered the grim rough face of the country-side into something very handsome no doubt, but the imagination must be set to work to call back the arena as it was on the battle-day. From various points of vantage memorials make appeal, statues, obelisks, Greek temples, and porches, bewildering in their number, and now and then making doubtful claims. "This general," some scrutiniser will tell you, "never held the line ascribed to him and that pompous pile falsely does honour to troops who really wavered in the crisis." I know I run counter to prevailing sentiment in saying that I prefer a field unchanged, not with features blurred by an overlaying of ornamental and commemorative accretions. A few markers of the simplest, and a plain tablet now and then where a hero fell or valour was unusually conspicuous, should suffice, for a field is more impressive that lies for the most part in its original rudeness and solitude. At Antietam I found little obtrusive. Sherman's fields on the way to and about Atlanta have not been marred; nor at Franklin and Nashville are the plains parked and obelisked out of recognition. At Bull Run I climbed with a veteran of the signal-service into the top of a high tree, an old war-time station, on the hill near the Henry House. The precarious platform remained. From such an eyrie in the same grove, perhaps from this same tree, a Southern friend of mine, on the battle-day, caught sight more than two leagues away of the glint of sunlight on cannon and bayonets toward Sudley Springs, and sent timely notice to Beauregard that a Federal column was turning his left. Under my eye the landscape was unchanged, with no smoothings or intrusions to embarrass the imagination in making the scene real. But it was in the Wilderness that I felt especially grateful that the wild thickets for the most part had been let alone. I found at Fredericksburg an old Confederate, one of Mahone's command, and hiring an excellent roadster, we drove on a perfect autumn day first to Spottsylvania Court House, then across country to the Brock road, then home by the Wilderness church and Chancellorsville. On the area we traversed were fought four of our most memorable battles, an area now scarcely less tangled and lonely than when the Federals poured across the Rappahannock into its thickets by the thousand, and were so memorably met. My veteran knew