It was better than a carload of medicines and a train load of provisions would have been.
From the depths of despondency we sprang at once to tip-toe on the mountain-tops of expectation.

We did little day and night but listen for the sound of Sherman's guns and discuss what we would do when he came.
We planned schemes of terrible vengeance on Barrett and Iverson, but these worthies had mysteriously disappeared--whither no one knew.

There was hardly an hour of any night passed without some one of us fancying that he heard the welcome sound of distant firing.

As everybody knows, by listening intently at night, one can hear just exactly what he is intent upon hearing, and so was with us.

In the middle of the night boys listening awake with strained ears, would say: "Now, if ever I heard musketry firing in my life, that's a heavy skirmish line at work, and sharply too, and not more than three miles away, neither." Then another would say: "I don't want to ever get out of here if that don't sound just as the skirmishing at Chancellorsville did the first day to us.