the order for their attendance at a given point next day. It seemed that

a sudden and great change had come. It was the actual appearance
of what had hitherto only been theoretical -- war. The next morning

the Captain, in full uniform, took leave of the assembled plantation,
with a few solemn words commending all he left behind to God,

and galloped away up the big road to join and lead his battery to the war,
and to be gone just four years.

Within a month he was on "the Peninsula" with Magruder, guarding Virginia
on the east against the first attack. His camp was first at Yorktown

and then on Jamestown Island, the honor having been assigned his battery
of guarding the oldest cradle of the race on this continent.

It was at "Little Bethel" that his guns were first trained on the enemy,
and that the battery first saw what they had to do, and from this time

until the middle of April, 1865, they were in service, and no battery
saw more service or suffered more in it. Its story was a part of the story

of the Southern Army in Virginia. The Captain was a rigid disciplinarian,
and his company had more work to do than most new companies.

A pious churchman, of the old puritanical type not uncommon to Virginia,
he looked after the spiritual as well as the physicalwelfare of his men,

and his chaplain or he read prayers at the head of his company
every morning during the war. At first he was not popular with the men,

he made the duties of camp life so onerous to them, it was
"nothing but drilling and praying all the time," they said.

But he had not commanded very long before they came to know
the stuff that was in him. He had not been in service a year

before he had had four horses shot under him, and when later on
he was offered the command of a battalion, the old company petitioned

to be one of his batteries, and still remained under his command.
Before the first year was out the battery had, through its own elements,

and the discipline of the Captain, become a cohesive force,
and a distinct integer in the Army of Northern Virginia.

Young farmer recruits knew of its prestige and expressed preference for it
of many batteries of rapidly growing or grown reputation. Owing to

its high stand, the old and clumsy guns with which it had started out
were taken from it, and in their place was presented a battery of four fine,

brass, twelve-pound Napoleons of the newest and most approved kind,
and two three-inch Parrotts, all captured. The men were as pleased with them

as children with new toys. The care and attention needed to keep them
in prime order broke the monotony of camp life. They soon had

abundant opportunities to test their power. They worked admirably,
carried far, and were extraordinarilyaccurate in their aim.

The men from admiration of their guns grew to have first a pride in,
and then an affection for, them, and gave them nicknames as they did

their comrades; the four Napoleons being dubbed "The Evangelists",
and the two rifles being "The Eagle", because of its scream and force,

and "The Cat", because when it became hot from rapid firing "It jumped,"
they said, "like a cat." From many a hill-top in Virginia, Maryland,

and Pennsylvania "The Evangelists" spoke their hoarse message
of battle and death, "The Eagle" screamed her terrible note,

and "The Cat" jumped as she spat her deadly shot from her hot throat.
In the Valley of Virginia; on the levels of Henrico and Hanover;

on the slopes of Manassas; in the woods of Chancellorsville;
on the heights of Fredericksburg; at Antietam and Gettysburg;

in the Spottsylvania wilderness, and again on the Hanover levels
and on the lines before Petersburg, the old guns through nearly four years

roared from fiery throats their deadly messages. The history of the battery
was bound up with the history of Lee's army. A rivalrysprang up

among the detachments of the different guns, and their several records were
jealously kept. The number of duels each gun was in was carefully counted,

every scar got in battle was treasured, and the men around their camp-fires,
at their scanty messes, or on the march, bragged of them among themselves

and avouched them as witnesses. New recruits coming in to fill the gaps
made by the killed and disabled, readily fell in with the common mood

and caught the spirit like a contagion. It was not an uncommon thing
for a wheel to be smashed in by a shell, but if it happened to one gun

oftener than to another there was envy. Two of the Evangelists
seemed to be especially favored in this line, while the Cat was so exempt

as to become the subject of some derision. The men stood by the guns
till they were knocked to pieces, and when the fortune of the day

went against them, had with their own hands oftener than once saved them
after most of their horses were killed.

This had happened in turn to every gun, the men at times working like beavers
in mud up to their thighs and under a murderous fire to get their guns out.

Many a man had been killed tugging at trail or wheel when the day was
against them; but not a gun had ever been lost. At last the evil day arrived.

At Winchester a sudden and impetuouscharge for a while swept everything
before it, and carried the knoll where the old battery was posted;

but all the guns were got out by the toiling and rapidly dropping men,
except the Cat, which was captured with its entire detachmentworking at it

until they were surrounded and knocked from the piece by cavalrymen.
Most of the men who were not killed were retaken before the day was over,

with many guns; but the Cat was lost. She remained in the enemy's hands
and probably was being turned against her old comrades and lovers.

The company was inconsolable. The death of comrades was too natural
and common a thing to depress the men beyond what such occurrences

necessarily did; but to lose a gun! It was like losing the old Colonel;
it was worse: a gun was ranked as a brigadier; and the Cat was equal

to a major-general. The other guns seemed lost without her;
the Eagle especially, which generally went next to her, appeared to the men

to have a lonely and subdued air. The battery was no longer the same:
it seemed broken and depleted, shrunken to a mere section.

It was worse than Cold Harbor, where over half the men were killed or wounded.
The old Captain, now Colonel of the battalion, appreciated the loss

and apprehended its effect on the men as much as they themselves did,
and application was made for a gun to take the place of the lost piece;

but there was none to be had, as the men said they had known all along.
It was added -- perhaps by a department clerk -- that if they wanted a gun

to take the place of the one they had lost, they had better capture it.
"By ----, we will," they said -- adding epithets, intended for

the department clerk in his "bomb-proof", not to be printed in this record --
and they did. For some time afterwards in every engagement into which

they got there used to be speculation among them as to whether the Cat
were not there on the other side; some of the men swearing

they could tell her report, and even going to the rash length
of offering bets on her presence.

By one of those curious coincidences, as strange as anything in fiction,
a new general had, in 1864, come down across the Rapidan to take Richmond,

and the old battery had found a hill-top in the line in which Lee's army
lay stretched across "the Wilderness" country to stop him. The day,

though early in May, was a hot one, and the old battery, like most others,
had suffered fearfully. Two of the guns had had wheels cut down by shells

and the men had been badly cut up; but the fortune of the day
had been with Lee, and a little before nightfall, after a terrible fight,

there was a rapid advance, Lee's infantrysweeping everything before it,
and the artillery, after opening the way for the charge,

pushing along with it; now unlimbering as some vantage-ground was gained,
and using canister with deadly effect; now driving ahead again so rapidly

that it was mixed up with the muskets when the long line of breastworks
was carried with a rush, and a line of guns were caught still hot from their

rapid work. As the old battery, with lathered horses and smoke-grimed men,
swung up the crest and unlimbered on the captured breastwork,

a cheer went up which was heard even above the long general yell
of the advancing line, and for a moment half the men in the battery

crowded together around some object on the edge of the redoubt,
yelling like madmen. The next instant they divided, and there was the Cat,

smoke-grimed and blood-stained and still sweating hot from her last fire,
being dragged from her muddy ditch by as many men as could get hold

of trail-rope or wheel, and rushed into her old place beside the Eagle,
in time to be double-shotted with canister to the muzzle, and to pour it

from among her old comrades into her now retiring former masters. Still,
she had a new carriage, and her record was lost, while those of the other guns