He slept the first night at a log cabin that Jarvis had named, having reached it in due time, and the second day he reached, also in due time, the old Wilderness Road.
Thence the boy advanced by easy stages into Virginia until he reached a railroad, where he sold his horse and took a train for Richmond, having come in a few days out of the cool, peaceful atmosphere of the mountains into another, which was surcharged everywhere with the fiery breath of war.
Harry realized as he approached the capital the deep intensity of feeling in everybody.

The Virginians were less volatile than the South Carolinians, and they had long refused to go out, but now that they were out they were pouring into the Southern army, and they were animated by an extraordinary zeal.

He began to hear new or unfamiliar names, Early, and Ewell, and Jackson, and Lee, and Johnston, and Hill, and Stuart, and Ashby, names that he would never forget, but names that as yet meant little to him.
He had letters from his father and he expected to find his friends of Charleston in Richmond or at the front.

General Beauregard, whom he knew, would be in command of the army threatening Washington, and he would not go into a camp of strangers.
It was now early in June, and the country was at its best.

On both sides of the railway spread the fair Virginia fields, and the earth, save where the ploughed lands stretched, was in its deepest tints of green.