Her steed did the same, and the hearts of both swelled with the inspiration.
Away she sped over the firm, smooth Murfreesboro Pike, winding around hillsides and through valleys filled with infantry, cavalry and artillery, through interminable masses of wagons, hers of braying mules, and crowds of unarmed soldiers trudging back to Nashville, on leave of absence, to spend the day seeing the sights of the historic Tennessee capital.

In the camps the soldiers were busy with evergreen and bunting, and the contents of boxes received from the North, preparing for the celebration of Christmas in something like the manner of the old days of home and peace.
Like the sweet perfume of rose-attar from a bundle of letters unwittingly stirred in a drawer, rose the fragrant memory of the last of those Christmases in Sardis before the war, when winged on he scent of evergreens, and the merry laughter of the church decorators, came to her the knowledge that she had found a lodgment in the heart of Harry Glen.
Was memory juggling with her senses, or was that really his voice she heard in command, in a field to her left?
She turned a swift, startled look in that direction, and saw a Sergeant marching a large squad at quick time to join a heavy "detail." His back was toward her, but his figure and bodily carriage were certainly those of Harry Glen.

But before she could make certain the squad was merged with the "detail," to the obliteration of all individuality, and the whole mass disappeared around the hill.
She rode on to the top of the rim of hills which encircle that most picturesque of Southern cities, and stopped for a moment for a farewell to the stronghold of her friends, whose friendly cover she was abandoning to venture, weak and weaponless, into the camp of her enemies.
Above her the great black guns of a heavy fort pointed their sinister muzzles down the Murfreesboro road, with fearful suggestiveness of the dangers to be encountered there.
She remembered Lot's wife, but could not resist the temptation to take a one backward look.

She saw as grand a landscape picture as the world affords.
Serenely throned upon the hill that dominated the whole of the lovely valley of the Cumberland, stood the beautiful Capitol of Tennessee.
Ionic porticos and graceful Corinthian columns of dazzling white limestone rose hundreds of feet above the fountains and magnolia-shaded terraces that crowned the hill--still more hundreds of feet above the densely packed roofs and spires of the city crowded upon the hill's rocky sides.

It was like some fine and pure old Greek temple, standing on a romantic headland, far above the murk and toil of sordid striving.
But over the symmetrical pile floated a banner that meant to the world all that was signified even by the banners which Greece folded and laid away in eternal rest thousands of years ago.
At the foot of the hill the Cumberland, clear as when it descended from its mountains five hundred miles away, flowed between its high, straight walls of limestone, spanned by cobweb-like bridges, and bore on its untroubled breast a great fleet of high-chimneyed, white-sided transports, and black, sullen gunboats.