Southern Historical Society Papers, Volume 23.
Reverend J. William Jones, Ed.

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[121] on our tents and slept under the starlight. Our first slumbers were pleasantly broken by the sweet strains of ‘Listen to the Mocking-Bird,’ played by the band of the First Virginia infantry, which had taken its place near us soon after our arrival.

That day the camp was laid off regularly, and the tents, guns, and horses separated and systematically arranged. Here we were required, for the first time, to keep a line of sentinels around our camp. Hitherto we had only kept sentinels over the guns and the horses, and all the outside sentinel duty was done by the infantry. General Joseph E. Johnston's headquarters were a few hundred yards from us, and we saw him and other distinguished officers of his army frequently during our stay here. He held a review of his whole army one beautiful day, and we had our first opportunity of seeing a display of this kind. It awakened suspicions that we were invincible-but we had not seen a review of the Federal army.

Four regiments of infantry and our battery were selected to drill, when Governor Letcher made a visit here to the army for the purpose of presenting flags to the Virginia regiments. We drilled splendidly, as we thought, and General Jackson took great interest in it. As we marched out he rode up to the captain, and said, ‘Put them through the fast motions,’ which we did most effectually.

At this camp we had an intimation that on a certain night we would be visited by a brigade officer and men on ‘grand rounds.’ Lieutenant Graham was the commissioned officer in charge of the sentinels that night, and he and the sergeant of the guard visited all the ports and gave minute instructions to each sentinel as to what he must say and do. During the early part of the night the lieutenant and sergeant went around to test the sentinels' knowledge of their lesson. They approached the beat of Tom M., a humorous Irishman, who was on duty that night. He promptly halted the visitors, and demanded, ‘Who comes there?’ The answer was given, ‘Grand rounds’ Instead of halting the grand rounds and directing the approach of one man only, and demanding the countersign (which that night was ‘Austria’), he allowed both the visitors to approach together, and on the lieutenant's giving the word ‘Africa,’ our sentinel responded ‘All right, come along in.’ The visitors passed in, and then the lieutenant undertook to reprimand him and point out his blunders. When his attention was called to the fact that the wrong countersign was given, the gay sentinel, in the broadest Irish accents, exclaimed, ‘Indade! ah, well, I knew it was one of them demn'd foreign countries.’