True, the individual songs rarely coincided; there was a line here, a chorus there,--just enough to fix the class, but this was unmistakable.

It was not strange that they differed, for the range seemed almost endless, and South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida seemed to have nothing but the generic character in common, until all were mingled in the united stock of camp-melodies.
Often in the starlit evening, I have returned from some lonely ride by the swift river, or on the plover-haunted barrens, and, entering the camp, have silently approached some glimmering fire, round which the dusky figures moved in the rhythmical barbaric dance the negroes call a "shout," chanting, often harshly, but always in the most perfect time, some monotonous refrain.

Writing down in the darkness, as I best could,--perhaps with my hand in the safe covert of my pocket,--the words of the song, I have afterwards carried it to my tent, like some captured bird or insect, and then, after examination, put it by.

Or, summoning one of the men at some period of leisure,--Corporal Robert Sutton, for instance, whose iron memory held all the details of a song as if it were a ford or a forest,--I have completed the new specimen by supplying the absent parts.

The music I could only retain by ear, and though the more common strains were repeated often enough to fix their impression, there were others that occurred only once or twice.
The words will be here given, as nearly as possible, in the original dialect; and if the spelling seems sometimes inconsistent, or the misspelling insufficient, it is because I could get no nearer.