He disliked slavery, his father disliked it, and nearly all their friends
and relatives, and here they were fighting for it, as one of the two
great reasons of the Civil War. He felt anew how strangely things come
about, and that even the wisest cannot always choose their own courses
as they wish them.
A fire, chiefly for cooking purposes, had been built for the general and
his staff in a cove surrounded by trees. A small cold spring gushed from
the side of a hill, flowed down the center of the cove, and then made its
way through the trees into the wider world beyond. It was a fine little
spring, and before the general came, the younger members of the staff
knelt and drank deeply at it. It brought thoughts of home to all these
young rovers of the woods, who had drunk a thousand times before at just
such springs as this.
Soon Lee and his generals sat there on the stones or on the moss.
Longstreet, Stuart, Pickett, Alexander, Ewell, Early, Hill and many
others, some suffering from wounds, were with their commander, while the
young officers who were to fetch and carry sat on the fringe in the woods,
or stretched themselves on the turf.
Harry was in the group, but except in extreme emergency he would not
be on duty that night, as he had already been twenty-four hours in the
saddle.
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