A. J. Bennett, private , First Massachusetts Light Battery, The story of the First Massachusetts Light Battery , attached to the Sixth Army Corps : glance at events in the armies of the Potomac and Shenandoah, from the summer of 1861 to the autumn of 1864.

[74] greeting of the carrier, and the captain's characteristic smile which was a part of the greeting. A smile that shines through clear spectacles is peculiarly attractive, if the eyes behind them are in a genial face, as they were in this case.

During this and succeeding days, the boys who had any scrip visited farmhouses in the vicinity, and purchased loaves of homemade bread and canteens of milk. At this time, one of our men mysteriously disappeared and was seen no more by us for one year. Whether he was kidnapped by some of the secession sympathizers and conveyed to Dixie, or whether he went home by the underground route, or went into a trance, only awakening on the eve of the Wilderness campaign, we never knew. We left this camp, in painful uncertainty as to the fate of our friend, and during the next five days by easy stages, on a generally western course, made our way to the foot of that section of the Blue or Kittatinny Mountains, called in Maryland the Kittoctan. It was on the morning of the 12th of September that we moved over their crest and commenced the descent on their west side. What a panorama of autumn landscape, grandeur and loveliness, lay before us!

'T was Pleasant Valley. An earthly paradise, if anywhere there be one, lies in Maryland between the Kittoctan on the east, and the Blue Ridge on the west. There were the slopes of the mountains on either hand, now rounded in outline, now broken and craggy, now approaching their bases, descending in gentle declivities. There was the broad valley stretching up from the Potomac, on the east, miles of undulating curves; on the west, miles of intervale; over the face of all, farms, almost perfect pictures of thrift and plenty; orchards groaning with fruit of many varieties; broad acres golden with the ripened grain; groves of timber clean of underbrush; snug farm cottages and capacious barns, giving just the necessary variety to the scene; there were sheep on the hillsides, and herds of cows in the meadows; there were fine horses feeding in pastures. There away through the intervale extended the Monocacy like a broad ribbon of silver. All this, bathed by a healthy, stimulating atmosphere, and gilded by the rays of the September sun, was presented to our view. We seemed by some mental process, without conscious analysis, to grasp each of the elements of this wonderful picture at the moment the whole was presented to view when we