When you give him a sabre, pistol, and carbine, to take care of when he has all he can do to take care of himself, those terrors increase in proportion.

_Then_ show him the enemy and send him into battle--and what is the result?
Skedaddle! "Don't make any mistake; we haven't any cavalry yet.

Some day we will, when our men learn to ride faster than a walk." "God!" muttered a brigadier-general under his white moustache; "it's been a bitter pill to swallow--this raid around our entire army by fifteen hundred of Jeb Stuart's riders and two iron guns!" The half dozen lancers, lying on their bellies in the grass on the bank above the road where this discussion took place remained crimson, mute, paralysed with mortification.

Was _that_ what the army thought of them?
But they had little time for nursing their mortification that morning; the firing along the river was breaking out in patches with a viciousness and volume heretofore unheard; and a six-gun Confederate field battery had joined in, arousing the entire camp of Claymore's brigade.

Louder and louder grew the uproar along the river; smoke rose and took silvery-edged shape in the sunshine; bugles were calling to the colours regiments encamped on the right; a light battery trotted out across a distant meadow, unlimbered and went smartly into action.
About noon the bugles summoned the 3rd Zouaves.