struggle of Malvern Hill, in all of which he took part. He was then transferred to the signal service, and for a short period his headquarters were at Petersburg, where he had the advantage of a small local library. Later he was detached for outpost duty as a mounted signal

scout.

After describing a skirmish at Fort Boykin in 1863 his brother adds: "Nearly two years were passed in such skirmishes, racing to escape the enemy's gunboats, signaling dispatches, serenading country beauties, poring over chance books, and foraging for provender along the Blackwater." His conduct throughout was marked by a strict adherence to discipline as well as the bright insouciance of the American citizen-soldier; but neither pleasure nor hardships could win him from music and study, or veil from his eyes the beauties of nature. In camp he tries to set some of

Tennyson's songs to music, especially one in Elaine, "The Song of Love and Death." He studies the German language, and translates in intervals of repose or at night, after his horse is curried, Heine, Goethe, and Schiller for self-instruction. While he is serving with a detachment of scouts the enemy surprises their little camp and carries off, besides their clothes, cooking utensils, and cots, his treasures- “Heine,” "Aurora Leigh," "Les Miserables," "Macaria," and a German glossary. But no one but a poet could capture the glassy, cool, transculent wave of Burwell's Bay, the white shell beach, mile upon mile, the towering bluff decked with a million green mosses and trickling springs and crowned with great oaks holding out their arms from the top in a perpetual attitude of blessing, and the vast expanse across Hampton Roads, out between the capes, on to the broad waters. No, nor that little garden

of Eden there, now hid away in

"Tiger Lilies"

"a

small dell

which is round as a basin, two hundred yards in diameter, shut in on all sides. Beeches, oaks, lithe hickories, straight pines, roof over this dell with a magnificent boscage. In the center of it bubbles a limpid spring. Shy companies of flowers stand between the long grasses; some of them show wide, startled eyes, many of them have hidden away in cunning nooks. Over them, regarding them in silent and passionate tenderness, lean the ebony-fibered ferns; and the busy mosses do their very best to hide all rudeness and all decay behind a green velvet arras. The light does not dare shine very brightly here; it is soft and sacred, tempered with green leaves, with silence, with odors, with beauties. Wandering perfumes, restless with happiness, float about aimlessly; they are the only inhabitants here." Amid these

scenes there was a renewed " stirring within his soul of that genius which

was to place him among that goodly company whose fellowship he so dearly loved." One who knew him at this time describes him as a slender, gray-eyed youth, full of enthusiasm, playful with a dainty mirthfulness, a tender humor, most like the great musician, Mendelssohn.

In 1864 the brothers were separated, Sidney being assigned to duty as signal officer to the blockade runner "Annie." On the first run out of East Inlet, near Fort Fisher, she was captured, and Sidney, refusing to don the clothes of his fellow-officers, Englishmen, and declare himself a foreigner, was taken to Point Lookout prison, "where were sown the seeds of fell disease, to retard whose growth was the greatest part of his endeavor for the following few years." These days of confinement were

cheered by fellowship with a kindred spirit, another prisoner since widely known as the poet-priest, Father Tabb, and solaced by his inseparable companion through life, his flute, which he had carried hidden in his sleeve into the prison with him. After five months he was released on an exchange of prisoners, but owing to his thin clothing and the cold weather he came near dying on the water voyage to City Point. The story of his rescue from death is graphically told by the lady herself who was the good Samaritan on this occasion. She was an old friend from Montgomery, Ala., returning from New York to Richmond; and her little daughter, who had learned to call him "Brother Sid," chanced to hear that he was down in the hold of the vessel dying. On application to the colonel in command permission was promptly given to her to minister to his necessity, and