CHAPTER IV.

SOUTH MOUNTAIN.

THE next day I took the cars for Hagerstown; passed Sunday in that slow and ancient burg; and early on Monday morning set out by stage for Boonsboro'.

Our course lay down the valley of the Antietam. We crossed the stream at Funk's Town, a little over two miles from Hagerstown. "Stop at two miles and you won't be here," said the driver. The morning was fine; the air fresh and inspiring; and the fact that the country through which we passed had been fought over repeatedly during the war, added interest to the ride. A fertile valley: on each side were fields of tall and stalwart corn. Lusty milkweeds stood by the fences; the driver called them "wild cotton." And here the Jamestown-weed, with its pointed leaves, and flower resembling the bell of a morning-glory, became abundant. "That's jimson," said the driver; and he proceeded to extol its medicinal qualities. "Makes a good sa'v'. Rub that over a hoss, and I bet ye no fly lights on him!"

At Boonsboro' some time was consumed in finding a conveyance and a guide to take me over the battle-fields. At length I encountered Lewy Smith, light and jaunty Lewy Smith, with his light and jaunty covered carryall, — whom I would recommend to travellers. I engaged him for the afternoon of that day and for the day following; and immediately after dinner he was at the tavern-door, snapping his whip.

The traveller's most pleasant experience of Boonsboro' is leaving it. The town contains about nine hundred inhabitants; and the wonder is how so many human souls can rest

SOUTH MOUNTAIN.

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content to live in such a mouldy, lonesome place. But once outside of it, you find Nature as busy in making the world beautiful, as man inside has been in making it as ugly as possible. A country village carries with it the idea of something pleasant, shady, green; therefore do not think of Boonsboro' as a country village. Leave it behind you as soon as convenient, and turn your face to the mountain.

That is the famed South Mountain, where the prologue to the Antietam fight was enacted. "I never heard it called South Mountain till after the battle," said Lewy Smith. "It was always the Blue Ridge with us." He had never heard of Turner's Gap, or Frog Gap, either. "We always called it just the gap in the mountain." The road to the gap runs southeast from Boonsboro', then turns easterly up the hills. It stretched long and pleasant before us. "The night before the battle," said Lewy Smith," this road was lined with Rebels, I tell ye! Both sides were covered with them about as thick as they could lie. It was a great sight to see so many soldiers; and it didn't seem to us there were men enough in the Union army to fight them. We thought the Rebels had got possession of Maryland, sure. They just went into our stores and took what they pleased, and paid in Confederate money; they had come to stay, they said, and their money would be better than ours in a little while. Some who got plenty of it did well; for when the Rebels slaughtered a drove of cattle, they would sell the hides and take their own currency for pay."

The mountain rose before us, leopard-colored, spotted with sun and cloud. A few mean log houses were scattered along the road, near the summit of which we came to the Mountain House, a place of summer resort. Here again man had done his best to defeat the aim of Nature; the house and everything about it looked dreary and forbidding, while all around lay the beautiful mountain in its wild forest-shades.

Lewy left his horse at the stable, and we entered the woods, pursuing a mountain-road which runs south along the crest. A tramp of twenty minutes brought us to the scene of General Reno's brilliant achievement and heroic death. A rude

stone set up in the field, near a spreading chestnut, marks the spot where he fell. A few rods north of this, running east and west, is the mountain-road, with a stone wall on each side of it, where the Rebels fought furiously, until driven out from their defences by our boys coming up through the woods. The few wayside trees are riddled with bullets. A little higher up the crest is a log house, and a well in which fiftyseven dead Rebels are buried. "The owner of the house was offered a dollar a head for burying them. The easiest way he could do was to pitch them into the well. But he don't like to own up to having done it now."

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It was a sunny, breezy field. Up yer's a heap of air sturrin'," said a mountaineer, whom we met coming up the road. We sat down and talked with him by the stone wall; and he told us of his tribulations and mishaps on the day of the battle, attempting to fly south over the mountain with his family; overloading his wagon, and breaking down just as the shells began to explode around him; doing everything "wrong-eend fust, he was so skeered."

We pushed along through the woods to the eastern brow of the crest, in order to obtain a general view of the field. Emerging from among the trees, a superb scene opened before us, Catoctin Valley, like a poem in blue and gold, with its patches of hazy woods, sunlit misty fields, and the Catoctin Mountains rolling up ethereal beyond.

The bridge across Catoctin Creek, half a mile west of Middletown, where the fighting began on that memorable Sunday, September 14th, 1862, could be seen half hidden and far away below. There our troops came up with the rear-guard of the invading army. Driven back from the Creek, the Rebels massed their forces and formed their line of battle, two miles in extent, on this mountain-side, in positions of formidable strength. Standing on the brow of the commanding crest, you would say that ten thousand men, rightly posted, might here check the advance of ten times their number, hold the gap on the left there, and prevent the steep mountain-sides from being scaled.

SUNSET OVER THE ANTIETAM.

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In a barren pasture above the slope climbed by Reno's men in face of the Rebel fire, we came upon a little row of graves under some locust-trees. I took note of a few names lettered on the humble head-boards. "John Dunn;"" T. G. Dixon, Co. C, 23d Regt. O. V. I.;" several more were of the 23d Ohio, -the impetuous regiment that had that day its famous hand-tohand conflict with the 23d South Carolina, in which each man fought as though the honor of the nation depended upon his individual arm. Here lay the victorious fallen. A few had been removed from their rude graves. The head-boards of others had been knocked down by cows. We set them up again, and left the field to the pensive sound of the cow-bells and the teasing song of the locust.

Walking back to the road through the gap, and surveying the crests flanking and commanding it, which were held by the Rebels, but carried with irresistible impetuosity by the men of Burnside's and Hooker's corps, one is still more astonished by the successful issue of that terrible day's work. All along these heights rebel and loyal dead lie buried in graves scarcely distinguishable from each other. Long after the battle, explorers of the woods were accustomed to find, in hollows and behind logs, the remains of some poor fellow, generally a Rebel, who, wounded in the fight, or on the retreat, had dragged himself to such shelter as he could find, and died there, alone, uncared for, in the gloomy and silent wilderness.

Crampton's Gap, six miles farther south, stormed and carried that same Sabbath day by the men of Franklin's corps, I did not visit. The sun was setting as we turned our faces westward; and all the way down the mountain we had the Antietam valley before us, darkening and darkening under a sky full of the softest twilight tints and tranquillity.

CHAPTER V.

THE FIELD OF ANTIETAM.

Ar seven o'clock the next morning, light and jaunty Lewy Smith was snapping his whip again at the tavern-door; and I was soon riding out of the village by his side.

Our course lay along the line of the Rebel retreat and of the advance of the right wing of our army. A pleasant road, under the edge of woods still wet with recent rain, brought us to Keedysville, a little cluster of brick and log houses, all of which, Lewy told me, were turned into hospitals after the great battle. At the farther end of the town is a brick church. "That was a hospital too. Many an arm, a leg, a hand, was left there by our boys. There's a pit behind the church, five feet long, five feet deep, and two feet wide, just full of legs and arms."

We rode on until we obtained a view of the pleasant hillsides where Porter lay with his reserves, while the other armycorps did the fighting, on the day of Antietam; then turned to the right down a little stream, and past a dam, the waters of which glided still and shadowy under fringed banks; and soon came in sight of the fields where the great fight began. There they lay, over the farther bank of the Antietam, some green, some ploughed, the latter turning up yellow as ripe grain in the morning light.

"We used to could drive all over this country where we pleased. The fences were laid down, and it was all trampled and cut up with the wagons, and soldiers, and artillery." But the fences had been replaced, and now Lewy was obliged to keep the open road.

At a turn we came to a farm-house, near which were a number of dilapidated barns and other outbuildings, and some ald straw stacks. "It was a sight to behold, passing yer after