There was great confusion, hurried hand-shaking, sometimes no hand-shaking at all, no time for good-bys. The soldiers could not stand on the order of their going. I do not remember how I came to the farmhouse, but I know that my husband bundled me unceremoniously into a cart with some people I hardly knew, and sent me home, telling me to pack my trunk but not to be disappointed if he could not take me with him. I did not lie down at all. I packed my trunk as soon as I got home, then sat down and waited, and before long my husband came for me in an ambulance. His courier, Lieutenant Wumble, was with him, and the ambulance was driven by an Irishman named Miles. The horses were tied to the back of the ambulance, and frequently my husband and Lieutenant Wumble rode ahead reconnoitering. It began to rain. “What made you always start in the rain?” I have been asked by friends to whom I was relating my campaigns. What I want to know is, what made it always rain when I started? Let me but step into an ambulance and immediately it began to rain. My movements had to be regulated by the movements of the army, not by the weather, though really the weather seemed to regulate itself by mine. We found the roads worse as we advanced. The farther we went the deeper was the mud. Mud came up to the hubs of our wheels; the mules could hardly pull their feet up out of the miry mass in some places. At last we found ourselves regularly “stuck in the mud.” There was no pushing or pulling the ambulance farther. It was nearly dark, but fortunately we were near a farmhouse, and at the side of the road where we got stuck was a stile made by blocks of unequal heights set on either side of a plank fence. These blocks were simply sections of the round body of a tree which had been sawed up. On the opposite side of the stile a pathway led to the house. The mud-hole in which our ambulance was embedded was about ten yards from the stile. My husband insisted that I be carried bodily to the stile, and Lieutenant Wumble, who was one of the most gallant fellows in the world, took it as a matter of course that he must carry me. He urged that he had been brought along to be useful and that Dan had never recovered entirely from his wound. But Dan hooted at the idea! He was very much obliged to the lieutenant, but really he was used to this sort of thing, and understood lifting ladies about much better than Wumble. It was not altogether brute strength, but some science that was required. So Dan stepped out of the ambulance on to the side of the mud-hole, where of course the ground was not so muddy as in the center where we were stuck, but where it was rather slippery, nevertheless. Balancing himself nicely, he took me out, but just as he poised me on his arm with scientific ease and grace he slipped and fell backward, sprawling in the mud, and I went over his head, sprawling, too. Whereupon Lieutenant Wumble, laughing, came to pick me up, saying as he did so: