I took advantage of the day of rest after our return to have a gallop
about the outposts. Arlington Heights had been the spot whence the
alarmists threatened us daily with big thunder and bursting bombs. I was
curious to see the region that had had Washington under its thumb.
So Private W., tired of his foot-soldiering, got a quadruped under him,
and felt like a cavalier again. The horse took me along the tow-path of
the Cumberland Canal, as far as the redoubts where we had worked our
task. Then I turned up the hill, took a look at the camp of the New York
Twenty-Fifth at the left, and rode along for Arlington House.
Grand name! and the domain is really quite grand, but ill-kept. Fine
oaks make beauty without asking favors. Fine oaks and a fair view make
all the beauty of Arlington. It seems that this old establishment, like
many another old Virginian, had claimed its respectability for its
antiquity, and failed to keep up to the level of the time. The road
winds along through the trees, climbing to fairer and fairer reaches of
view over the plain of Washington. I had not fancied that there was any
such lovely site near the capital. But we have not yet appreciated what
Nature has done for us there. When civilization once makes up its mind
to colonize Washington, all this amphitheatre of hills will blossom with
structures of the sublimest gingerbread.
Arlington House is the antipodes of gingerbread, except that it is
yellow, and disposed to crumble. It has a pompous propylon of enormous
stuccoed columns. Any house smaller than Blenheim would tail on
insignificantly after such a frontispiece. The interior has a certain
careless, romantic, decayed-gentleman effect, wholly Virginian. It was
enlivened by the uniforms of staff-officers just now, and as they rode
through the trees of the approach and by the tents of the New York
Eighth, encamped in the grove to the rear, the _tableau_ was brilliantly
warlike. Here, by the way, let me pause to ask, as a horseman, though a
foot-soldier, why generals and other gorgeous fellows make such guys of
their horses with trappings. If the horse is a screw, cover him thick
with saddle-cloths, girths, cruppers, breast-bands, and as much brass
and tinsel as your pay will enable you to buy; but if not a screw, let
his fair proportions be seen as much as may be, and don't bother a lover
of good horseflesh to eliminate so much uniform before he can see what
is beneath.
From Arlington I rode to the other encampments,--the Sixty-Ninth, Fifth,
and Twenty-Eighth, all of New York,--and heard their several stories
of alarms and adventures. This completed the circuit of the new
fortification of the Great Camp. Washington was now a fortress. The
capital was out of danger, and therefore of no further interest to
anybody. The time had come for myself and my regiment to leave it by
different ways.
"PARTANT POUR LA SYRIE."
I should have been glad to stay and see my comrades through to their
departure; but there was a Massachusetts man down at Fortress Monroe,
Butler by name,--has any one heard of him?--and to this gentleman it
chanced that I was to report myself. So I packed my knapsack, got my
furlough, shook hands with my fellows, said good-bye to Camp Cameron,
and was off, two days after our month's service was done.