An Episode of '63.
By Henry Murray.
"He approached him cautiously."
IGHT had fallen on the banks of the Chippaloga, and the fight was over. It had been hot and fierce while it lasted, and the battered remnant of Southern troops, though at last they had been forced to flight, leaving one-third their force on the field, had thinned the numbers of their conquerors. Though the smallest of the episodes of a war whose issue settled the future of the American continent and affected the history of all mankind, the battle had brought the peace of death to many a valiant heart, its bitterness to many a woman and child, who, all unaware, were praying, safe in distant cities, for the husbands and fathers whose lips would never more meet theirs. Overhead, the stars sparkled keenly in the frosty sky, but from the horizon a ridge of inky cloud spread upward to the zenith, threatening not only to quench their feeble fire, but to deepen the crisp powdery snow in which the landscape was smothered. The river ran like a long black snake between its whitened banks.
To Roland Pearse, monotonously tramping on sentry duty along the track worn by his own feet in the snow at a tantalising distance from the nearest of the small watch-fires which gleamed around the central one, where the officers were sunk in sleep, it seemed as if the dawn would never come. A year's hard campaigning
