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The works have to be built under shell-fire, but when finished they will be an inestimable advantage to regiments that occupy day and night hill-crests where they might be enfiladed by long-range artillery fire.
A few moments later one of these had his horse shot under him, and then a volley was fired which took little effect on the advancing horsemen, still too far away for successful aim. They had been carefully skirting a wooded patch which might give shelter to their foes, whom they soon discovered to be lying in trenches behind the first hill-crests.
It glittered among the tree-tops, gilded the hill-crests, changed the eastern horizon into a molten sea of warmest gold and colour; and " "Transfigured Rose, eh," he broke in, with a smile. She laughed merrily as she said: "I am afraid I was forgetting myself, talking so much description!" A shadow passed over her face, as she went on: "How quickly everything was to be changed, though!
To her it was a different scene, of some southern country, because she seemed to see vineyards, and high-walled lanes, hill-crests crowded with houses and crowned with churches, such as one sees at a distance in the Campagna, where the plain breaks into chestnut-clad hills.
The rest of the army was with Jackson at Harper's Ferry, or co-operating with him in the neighborhood of Maryland Heights. Out of forty-four brigades, Lee could put but fourteen or fifteen in line that day to oppose McClellan. He was very strong in artillery, however, and his cannon looked grimly over the hill-crests behind which his infantry were lying.
And between their swelling contours lay a country of lesser hills and valleys, equally snowless, and whose heart was the flood of a great river. Sterility had passed. Here were no barren hill-crests with a hundred weatherworn facets. Here were no fields of snow, driven by the fierce gales of the polar seas. Here were no glacial fields bound in an iron grip throughout the ages.
Not I; my pen falls lifeless; it would take a Moore to sing of; a Byron to immortalise; a Longfellow, a Whittier or a Tennyson to make an idyl of; it has sent artists wild; the eye rests lovingly on the hill-crests of the Sabine, Volscian and Albano on the one side, then turns to the city with its temples, its palaces, the historic past showing in their very stones.
More even than the acclaimed viewpoints, to which residents like me and visitors from all the world flocked on fine afternoons, did I esteem those places on the roads radiating from Rome where a traveller faring Romeward caught his first sight of the city; or those points where, if one road had several hill-crests in succession, one had the best view possible anywhere along the road.
In this pitiable condition they had been forced to keep night-watch on the hill-crests, in the rain, to lie in the trenches, and to work on fortifications and bomb-proofs. And they were expected to do all of these things on what strength they could get from horse-meat, biscuits of the toughness and composition of those that are fed to dogs, and on "mealies," which is what we call corn.
The hill-crests were clear, and the edge of the visible woodland, and the top half of the ship's shining hull rose clear of curiously-tinted, slowly writhing fog. But everything else seemed submerged in a sea of milk. But the mist grew thinner as the sun shone on it. Its top writhed to nothingness. All this was wholly commonplace. Even clouds in the sky were of types well-known enough.
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