Here I got breakfast, a pocketfull of bread and meat to carry with me, a fresh horse, a pair of butternut trousers, and the news that several houses supposed to belong to Unionists had been burnt by Rebels during the night. Petterbridge also said that quite a body of Confederate troops had passed down the valley a mile back the day before, and gave me the agreeable bit of information that the country ahead was worse, if possible, than what I had just come through, being alive with raiders and bushwhackers as well as overrun with stragglers anxious to get to the front. Devotedly hoping that I might miss all these ill-regulated gentlemen, I left Petterbridge's and pushed on. The horse I had taken was only a fair traveler, but then he was not too valuable to abandon to the enemy. A number of times I met and was accosted by single stragglers and skulkers. They were a pitiful looking set of men, ragged as Lazarus, generally barefoot, and gaunt almost to emaciation. I always stopped at the least effort on their part to enter into conversation, and asked earnestly after a lost cow or a fictitious companion, varying the inquiry as I thought my interlocutor took me for one of the mountaineers indigenous to that region, or for one of themselves. I never willingly ran against them, but it was impossible to avoid them entirely, for they were making for the Potomac, and I was practically following its course and going across their line of march. There was really little to fear from them. They could not know that I was a Union spy, and they were not a suspicious set of men anyway. It was the bushwhackers and raiders I was most in danger from, and more from the bushwhackers than the raiders. The latter, like the stragglers, kept on and near the roads, and there was always enough of them together to make me aware of their presence by their noise, so with due caution I would not be likely to encounter them. More than a dozen times I drew up into thickets and ravines to let a party of them pass, and several other times saw squads in the distance. From the bushwhackers I had no protection. Singularly enough I did not actually encounter any, although I discerned a good many by the aid of my imagination and had plenty of evidence of their actual near presence. The whole country was an extremely pretty one to bushwhack in. I tried to let the fact slip my mind, but I had an unpleasant, ticklish sensation in my back the whole time and longed for an eye in the rear of my head to keep a lookout in the direction from which I particularly anticipated a bullet.