We lay in camp more than a week, ready to move, but awaiting orders. The country (a very wet one) was frozen hard and covered with snow. Our order to march and the thaw came together, on the 22d of January. We were to cross the Obion River (and bottom) at Sharp's Ferry, twenty-three miles southwest of our camp. The command consisted of the Fourth Missouri (with a battery), Second New Jersey, Seventh Indiana, Nineteenth Pennsylvania, and Frank Moore's Battalion of the Second Illinois; in all about twenty-five hundred well-mounted men present for duty. The roads were deep with mud and slush, and every creek was "out of its banks" with the thaw. We reached the ferry only at nightfall of the 23d, over roads that had hourly grown deeper and more difficult. Two regiments had crossed, through floating ice (eight horses at a trip), by a rope-ferry, and at nine o'clock in the evening, under a full moon and a summer temperature, I crossed with staff and escort. The river was already so swollen that we landed in two feet of water, and still it was rising. Our camp was fixed five miles away on the upland. The first mile was only wet and nasty, and the trail not hard to follow. Then we came to the "back slough," thirty feet wide, four feet deep, and still covered with four inches of ice. Those who had gone before had broken a track through this, and swept the fragments of ice forward until near the shore they were packed in for a width of ten feet or more, and to the full depth of the water. I can make no stronger statement than that we all got through safely, only wet to the skin. How it was done I do not pretend to know. Some went in one way and some in another. All I can assert is that my stalwart old Max, when he found himself standing, belly deep, in broken ice, settled quietly on his haunches and took my two hundred pounds with one spring on to dry land four feet higher than his starting-point, and twelve feet away,--but then, Max always was a marvel. Guy, who carried Ike, scrambled over the top of the broken ice as only he or a cat could do. The others fared variously. All were drenched, and some were hurt, but all got to the shore at last. Then came the hour-long tug to get my ambulance through with its store of tent-hold goods and we started for our remaining four miles. The trail, even of cavalry, is not easily followed by moonlight when covered with half a foot of water, and we lost our way; reaching camp, after fourteen miles of hard travel, at four o'clock in the morning.