The soldier who is untried in the fearful ordeal of war looks forward with a kind of adventurous excitement to the time when he shall cross swords with the enemy; and especially if his heart is bound up in the cause, and his motives lie deeper than mere love of adventure, he desires to stand at the post of duty, though it be in the deadly charge, and at the cannon’s mouth.
At length the last day of November, a beautiful Sabbath, came, and with it marching orders. All attention was now concentrated upon the movement to take place the next day, at nine o’clock. The cooks were busy preparing rations for the march; the men were arranging their traps in the most portable form, and all looked forward with eager interest to the new scenes before us. At the appointed time, on the following morning, the Twenty-seventh, with the other regiments in the brigade, began the march for Washington, leaving our comparatively commodious A tents standing. Henceforth, shelter-tents, and for much of the time no tents at all, were to be our covering. Our final destination was all a mystery, until, as the days advanced, conjecture was enabled, with some probability, to fix upon Fredericksburg.
[18]
 The march across Chain Bridge, through Georgetown and Washington, and down the Potomac, fifteen miles, consumed the first day, and that night a tired set slept beneath their shelter-tents, nestling in the woods by the road-side.
By eight o’clock, December second, we were again in motion, and before sundown accomplished the appointed distance of twenty miles, through a pleasant country, divided into large and apparently well-cultivated plantations. Sambo’s glittering ivory and staring eyes gleamed from many gateways, greeting us half suspiciously. One young colored boy concluded he had been beaten quite long enough by his master, and not liking the prospect before him if he remained in slavery, thought best to join the column, and march to freedom. In anticipation of some such proceedings on the part of the colored population, the planters of that region patrolled the roads on horseback, watching our ranks as we filed past, to see if some luckless contraband were not harbored therein.
The third day brought us within three miles of Port Tobacco, and without standing on ceremony, we encamped for the night on the grounds of a secessionist planter, and availed ourselves of his abundant store of hay and straw. December fourth, we passed through the town—a very ordinary, shabby-looking place, whose secession population hardly deigned to glance at us, except from behind closed shutters.
Thus far the weather had been delightful, but the fifth day of our march, and the last on the Maryland side of the Potomac, opened rather inauspiciously, and by the time we reached the river bank at Liverpool Point, a cold rain-storm had set in, in which we were obliged to
[19]
 stand a couple of hours awaiting our turn to be ferried across to Acquia Landing. At length the rain changed into driving snow, and when we arrived at the Landing, the surrounding hills were white with the generous deposit. The village at Acquia Creek, after being evacuated sundry times, had risen again from the ashes of several burnings to become the base of supplies for Burnside’s army before Fredericksburg. Busy carpenters were rearing storehouses, eventually to take their turn at conflagration, and the offing was full of vessels of every description, loaded with stores to be transferred by rail to Falmouth.
In the snow we disembarked, and after many delays reached our camping ground, on a hill-side, a mile or more up the railroad. It was now evening, and the prospect seemed anything but encouraging, in view of the fact that the storm continued with even augmented fury. We pitched our shelter-tents and made our beds in the snow, and built fires, under difficulties which can hardly be exaggerat............