Wet towels, soda-water, and a few wholesome kicks in the rear having rendered Company 3, Regiment 5, Mackerel Brigade, sufficiently certain of their legs to march a polka in the space of an ordinary corn field, Captain Villiam Brown placed himself at their head, and, flanked by a canteen and an adjutant, the combined pageant was just about to move on a reconnoitering expedition as I came up. "Ha!" said Villiam, hastily placing his shirt-frill over the neck of a bottle that accidentally peeped from his bosom--"I am about to lead these noble beings on the path of glory, and you shall participate in the beams." Without a word, I turned his left wing; and as the band, which consisted of a fat Dutchman and a night-key bugle, struck up "Drops of Brandy," we moved onward, like the celestial vision of childhood's dream. Like the radiance of a higher heaven streaming through the golden-tinted windows of some grand old cathedral, fell the softened light of that April afternoon, on budding Nature, as we halted before a piece of woods just this side of Strasburg. On the new leaves of the trees in front of us the sunshine coined a thousand phantom cataracts of specie, and in the vale below us a delicate purple shadow wrestled with the hill-reflected fire of the sun. Deep silence fell on Company 3, Regiment 5, Mackerel Brigade; the band put his instrument on the ring with the key of his trunk, and Villiam softly reconnoitred through a spy-glass furnished with a cork. Suddenly the tones of a rich, manly voice swelled up from the bosom of the valley. "Hush!" says Villiam, sternly eyeing the band, who had just hiccupped--"'tis the song of the Contrabands." [Illustration] We all listened, and could distinctly hear the following words of the singer: "They're holding camp-meeting in Hickory Swamp, O, let my people go; De preacher's so dark dat he carry um lamp, O, let my people go. De brudders am singing dis jubilee tune, O, let my people go; Two dollars a year for de Weekly Tribune, O, let my people go!" As the strain died away in the distance, the adjutant slapped his left leg. "Why," said he, dreamily, "that must be Greeley down there." "No!" says Villiam, solemnly, "it is one of the wronged children of tyranny warbling the suppressed hymn of his injured people. It is a sign," says Villiam, trembling with bravery, "that the Southern Confederacy is somewhere around; for when you hear the squeak of the agonized rat," said Villiam, philosophically, "you may be sure that the sanguinary terrier is on the war-path."