This app gives you all the unique moments of exploring - game before
+5K
comment this
+2K
like this
This app gives you all the unique moments of exploring - game before
+5K
comment this
+2K
like this
This app gives you all the unique moments of exploring - game before
+5K
comment this
+2K
like this
This app gives you all the unique moments of exploring - game before
+5K
comment this
+2K
like this
This app gives you all the unique moments of exploring - game before
+5K
comment this
+2K
like this
He meant the north side, opposite that one by which we had come from church. Here the landscape was much the same as there; wide fields on each side the fenced highway that still ran north and south, and woods for the sky-line everywhere. We chose an easy footpath along the northern fence of the grove, crossed the highway, and passed on a few steps alongside the woods-pasture fence. We talked as we went, he giving the kindest heed to my every word though I could see that, like any good soldier, he was scanning all the ground for its fighting values, and, not to be outdone, I, myself, pointed out, a short way up the public road, a fence-gap on the left, made by our camping soldiers two nights before. It was at another such gap, in the woods-pasture fence, that we turned back by a path through it which led into the wood and so again toward the highway and the house-grove. The evening General Austin sent me to Wiggins it was at this gap that I saw old Dismukes sitting cross-legged on the ground, playing poker; and here, now, I summoned the desperation to speak directly to my point.SIGNING THE TREATY OF TIEN-TSIN. SIGNING THE TREATY OF TIEN-TSIN.But at that moment, as the constable afterwards described it to himself, it seemed to him that there came before his eyes a sort of mist. The figure leaning against the lamp-post looked less obvious. He did not appear now to be a palpable individual at all, but a sort of shadowy outline of himself, blurred and in[Pg 91]distinct. The constable rubbed his eyes and stretched out a hand.Wonderful eyes she had; deep blue, as I have said, in color; black, in spirit; never so wonderful as when having sparkled black they quieted to blue again. Always then there came the slightest of contractions at the outer corners of the delicate lids, that gave a fourfold expression of thought, passion, tenderness and intrepidity. I never saw that silent meaning in but one other pair of eyes; wherever it turned it said--at the same time saying many other things but saying this always plainest--"I see both out and in; I know myself--and thee." Never but in one other pair of eyes? no; and whose were those? Ned Ferry's.Ferry led Kendall and me into the woods, the other two remaining. We found rising ground, and had ridden but a few minutes when from its crest we looked upon a startling sight. In front of us was a stretch of specially well farmed land. Our woods swept round it on both sides, crossed a highway, and gradually closed in again so as to terminate the opening about half a mile away. Always the same crops, bottom cause of the war: from us to the road an admirable planting of cotton, and from there to the farther woods as goodly a show of thick corn. The whole acreage swept downward to that terminus, at the same time sinking inward from the two sides. On the highway shone the lighted rear window of a roadside "store," and down the two sides of the whole tract stretched the hundred tent-fires of two brigade camps of the enemy's cavalry. Their new, white canvases were pitched in long, even alleys following the borders of the wood, from which the brush had been cut away far enough for half of them to stand under the trees. The men had quieted down to sleep, but at one tent very near us a group of regimental officers sat in the light of a torch-basket, and by them were planted their colors. A quartet of capital voices were singing, and one who joined the chorus, standing by the flag, absently yet caressingly spread it at such breadth that we easily read on it the name of the command. Let me leave that out.Fred tried to open a conversation with a boy who was evidently out for a walk with his mother. The little fellow was somewhat shy at first, but very soon he became entirely confident that the stranger would not harm him, and he did his best to talk. They did not succeed very well in[Pg 194] their interchange of ideas, as neither could speak the language of the other, and so they attempted an exchange of presents. Fred gave the young native an American lead-pencil that opened and closed with a screw, and received in return the fan which the youth carried in his hand. Both appeared well pleased with the transaction, and after several bows and "sayonaras" they separated.
