Three Years in the Confederate Horse Artillery — George Michael Neese.

August 1 — Early this morning found us striking tents and packing up our all for a general move to eastern Virginia. From all appearances and indications we will bid farewell to the Valley for some time, as the shifting scenes of war seem to center at present in eastern Virginia, and Heaven only knows where the next tragedy will be put on the boards for enactment. When the bugle sounded for forward march we started up the pike, passed through Harrisonburg and Mount Crawford. At the Augusta County line we left the pike, turned to the left, and marched across the country to Weyer’s Cave, where we camped to-night.

July 31 — Received orders this evening to get ready to march to-morrow morning.

July 29 — This morning I left the peaceful haunts of home and am off again for the desolating scenes of war. I took stage at New Market at nine o’clock, and arrived in Harrisonburg at one. I fooled around town a few hours, and five o’clock found me in camp ready to answer evening roll-call.

July 25 — This morning we started for our camp at Harrisonburg. At New Market Captain Chew generously granted me a leave of absence to remain at home for a few days. Home, friends, and haunts of childhood are as dear as ever, but cannot be fully enjoyed with entire satisfaction as long as a desolating war cloud hangs over the sunny South and mars and obscures the sweet light of independent freedom.

Most of my former friends and associates of my youth are away on the tented field, which makes me feel rather lonely and dissatisfied, although reveling in the abundance of extra rations and environed by the comforts of home.

July 24 — Early this morning we renewed our march and crossed the mountain and moved in the direction of Luray. At the Shenandoah we found the Yankee pickets posted on the east bank of the river. We silently and unobserved approached the heights on the west side of the river which overlooked the picket post that was held by about a dozen Yanks. We unlimbered one gun and landed a twelve-pound shell right in the midst of them, which was a regular astonisher from the way in which the Yanks, in the twinkling of an eye, scattered. It was an utter surprise to them, and in two minutes after we fired I did not see a single bluecoat. They all disappeared in the direction of Luray, without taking time to reconnoiter and ascertain where the little howling monster hailed from that came plowing through their picket post without permission and so unceremoniously. After we fired we fell back to a piece of woods about half a mile from the river and waited to see what else our shell would stir up beyond the Shenandoah. In about half an hour after we fell back a four-gun battery appeared on a high hill on the opposite side of the river, thoroughly commanding our position. They opened on us with all four guns. We did not return their fire, but fell back about a mile out of the range of their guns. They shelled our cavalry for a while and then ceased. I saw one of their shell tear up the ground and pass through right under Colonel Harman’s horse, without doing the least damage to man or horse.

I think that the object of our scout was merely to let the Yanks know that some of us are still around. After the firing had all died away and we found that the Yanks would not venture to come to our side of the river, we fell back to the foot of Massanutten, and camped.

July 23— To-day at noon we started on a scout to Page County with the Twelfth Regiment of cavalry. We marched down the Valley pike to New Market, then turned east and moved out two miles on the Sperryville pike, and camped for the night at the western foot of the Massanutten.

July 12 — To-day we moved again, and we are now camped a quarter mile west of the pike, and two miles below Harrisonburg.

June 28 — To-day we moved camp a half mile farther down the pike, on the east side in a wood.

June 22 — We had preaching in camp to-day again, and we are getting in a goodly supply of heavenly ammunition from the arsenal of truth — in double doses, preaching in the morning and prayer meeting at night. The ammunition is fixed and ready to fire at all times and under all circumstances, and I hope that we may all pack at least some of it away in the cartridge box of fortitude for immediate and constant use, and not act like the great majority of the world, both saints and sinners, who use it all up in empty ceremonials on Sunday, having not enough left on Monday morning to make a decent skirmish against the inroads of wrongdoing, hypocrisy, and rascality.

This evening at dusk our chaplain held a prayer meeting in camp. It was in a beautiful part of the woods where his tent stood, and the quartermaster pro tern, of Heaven was standing in the door of his tent and issued with lavish supply the rations of holy manna from the Sacred Receptacle that was stocked by Moses, David, and Christ in the dim ages of long ago. Two little tallow candles stuck against the black bark of a rough oak tree, with vacillating and flickering gleam, was the grand chandelier that furnished the light. Mother Earth strewn and carpeted with last autumn’s brown leaves provided vast and ample seating accommodations for the sun-tanned warriors that rode and fought with Ashby through storms of shot and shell, but now had sheathed their trusty blades, and in reverence received their holy rations of moral rectitude in perfect silence and with good behavior, without the least murmur or complaint of who was to have first choice.

Bright stars that flashed their silvery light from the silent dome of the temple here and there peeped through the little interstices in the thick foliage of the overarching forest trees. A solitary cricket not far away chirped its vesper hymn in measured cadences in the same tone and strain that its kindred chanted in the crevices of the old brick fireplace around the hearthstone at home when I was a child. Oh, how nimbly and vividly thought plays on the harp of memory when its sleeping strings are touched by the fingers of the past!