Trotwood loves to take as well as to give and the following letter is too rich to go into any waste basket. I do not know the writer, but it has been sent by an esteemed friend, a colonel of an Ohio regiment who was on the firing line at Shiloh, the letter having been written to him by a comrade now living in California. Of him our correspondent writes: “He spent four years in the Civil War, and when he came home to Ohio at the termination of the war he was not yet old enough to vote.” But here is his letter: “My dear Colonel: I am enjoying every inch of the text work in _Trotwood’s_—and especially that part that deals with the blue and gray paladins that wrestled for a time on the flanges of hell—in order to become better _acquainted_. “Sometime, when you meet our friend Trotwood, tell him you once knew a trembling country boy, with calliper legs, who enlisted in the earliest earlies, and really thought for a time that he was a quarter section of Mars, until he hit Shiloh—and he has never fully recovered confidence in himself since. Even to this day, that boy needs no map of the ‘high places’ between Shiloh Church and the river bluffs. If there was a _sunken road_, it was so far below the level of the chain of pinnacles that youngster made use of in ‘promoting’ distance between _section_ lines, that he only knows of it by hearsay and tradition, and that vortex called the ‘Hornet’s Nest’ was omnipresent in that lad’s ears until the following June. So far as that youth remembers, the “Purdy Road” only had _one end_ leading in a bee-line to the steamboat landing, and he well remembers that large stocks of cannon balls were bursting in job lots as he crossed that open furnace known as the ‘Jones Field.’ For a number of days after the carnage at Shiloh this stripling of the tented field had no appetite for the ordinary rations, and it is doubtful if the best vaudeville extant could have made him sit up and take notice. He was much like Artemus Ward’s baby bear that straddled a buzz saw—_willing to quit_. Printer’s ink has been ladled out by the pailful to show that Shiloh was not a surprise; but the young truthful James of this sketch says that it was a ‘23’ for him—a powder and ball—before-breakfast surprise, accompanied by demoniacal yells that frayed the atmosphere and loosened the tent-pins of Sherman’s entire lines. If the loss of tents, luggage, arms, munitions, keepsakes, love letters, confidence, pride and self-respect was not enough to constitute evidences of a full-grown surprise, there was certainly nothing additional to throw in _unless it might be the epiglottis and the back teeth_. The youthful scion of this preachment says he has no doubt but the worthy men who wore the gray have had many a hearty laugh at the Herculean efforts of the North to show that Shiloh was not a surprise. Apropos of this, we are reminded of Len Wardlow, who was hurled from a sixth-story apartment during the San