Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Army Life in a Black Regiment

[140] with countersign and instructions, and sent off again. Then we scattered to our various rides, all disguised as duty; one to inspect pickets, one to visit a sick soldier, one to build a bridge or clear a road, and still another to Headquarters for ammunition or commissary stores. Galloping through green lanes, miles of triumphal arches of wild roses,--roses pale and large and fragrant, mingled with great boughs of the white cornel, fantastic masses, snowy surprises,--such were our rides, ranging from eight to fifteen and even twenty miles. Back to a late dinner with our various experiences, and perhaps specimens to match,--a thunder-snake, eight feet long; a live opossum, with the young clinging to the natural pouch; an armful of great white, scentless pond-lilies. After dinner, to the tangled garden for rosebuds or early magnolias, whose cloying fragrance will always bring back to me the full zest of those summer days; then dress-parade and a little drill as the day grew cool. In the evening, tea; and then the piazza or the fireside, as the case might be,--chess, cards,--perhaps a little music by aid of the assistant surgeon's melodeon, a few pages of Jean Paul's “Titan,” almost my only book, and carefully husbanded,--perhaps a mail, with its infinite felicities. Such was our day.

Night brought its own fascinations, more solitary and profound. The darker they were, the more clearly it was our duty to visit the pickets. The paths that had grown so familiar by day seemed a wholly new labyrinth by night; and every added shade of darkness seemed to shift and complicate them all anew, till at last man's skill grew utterly baffled, and the clew must be left to the instinct of the horse. Riding beneath the solemn starlight, or soft, gray mist, or densest blackness, the frogs croaking,