Those woods were to me a delight beyond all computation. To look at them, to go into them, to sit underneath them, to watch by the hour the veins of moss and the bark of the tree boles, to follow the curvature of the limbs as they grasped at the white clouds passing, to see the blue eyes of the sky peeping at me as I stared at them, to listen to the nothings of sounds that all men have heard in the sylvans, to forget in the balm of the scene the bitterness of memories and knowledge,—furnished me a mighty feast of harmless and negative enjoyment. With these feelings which I have not exaggerated,—keeping in view this sanctity of nature, for so many centuries uninvaded by any crime, save and except that doubtful one, of lovers meeting there to love outside of domestic parlors,—I perhaps more than anybody else was personally outraged at the act which not only destroyed human life, but smote the peace of the presence which Heaven had bestowed upon the scene, sublime in its ministering to a waif out of the wreck of revolution. I feel confident that to those persons who indulge in the faculty of thought beyond counters and desks, I need make no excuses for these digressions; for they will at once perceive that I am at least exhibiting one phase of the prelude to those terrible atrocities. The incident of my vicinity to the spot has great weight with me in the writing of this narrative, as it would be to those persons, who, though not being able to witness the actual battle, see the smoke of the conflict and hear the reverberation of the dread artillery. III. THE SCENE.