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[244]

Once under way, we kept the road all right, and when morning came, no time was allowed us for rest or coffee. We were bent on another flank movement, and success was contingent on dispatch. Our route lay through a fine section of country, which showed none of the war scars of the territory left behind.

Here were fields with sprouting wheat and growing corn and luxuriant clover; lowing herds, and the perfume of blossoms, and the song of summer birds; homesteads of the Virginia planter (everything on a large and generous scale), and great ancestral elms, dating back to the time before our forefathers learned to be Rebels. Coming, as the army so lately did, from where the tread of hostile feet for three years had made the country bare and barren as a threshing-floor, the region through which it now passed seemed a very Araby the Blest. Army of the Potomac. Swinton.

The barns and sheds were filled with tobacco in various stages of curing, to which lovers of the weed freely helped themselves.

A short halt was made at Guiney's Station; then, pressing on, we arrived at Bowling Green about noon, thirsty and dusty. This is a small settlement, forty-five miles north of Richmond, having in 1860 a white population of 237. There was not an able-bodied white man to be seen, but women, children, and negroes abounded. Some of the women were communicative, yet seemingly so only to give utterance to sentiments of the most intense disloyalty. ‘You'll be coming back over these roads quicker than you are going now.’ ‘Are you going “On to Richmond?” ’ ‘You'll all lay your bones in the ground before you get a sight of it,’—were mild specimens of the remarks with which they cheered us on in their most withering manner.

But we make brief pause here, and about 4 o'clock reach Milford Station, on the Richmond and

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