210 ADVENTURES IN THE WILDERNESS. 



he sent regiment after regiment, and brigade after 

 brigade, and division after division, to certain deatli. 

 Talk about Grant's disregard of human life, his 

 effort at Cold Harbor — and I ought to know, for I 

 got a minie in my shoulder that day — was hope- 

 ful and easy work to what Lee laid on Hill's and 

 Magruder's divisions at Malvern. It was at the 

 close of the second charge, when the yelling mass 

 reeled back from before the blaze of those sixty 

 guns and thirty thousand rifles, even as they began 

 to break and fly backward toward the woods, that 

 I saw from the spot where I lay a riderless horse 

 break out of the confused and flying mass, and, 

 wdth mane and tail erect and spreading nostril, 

 come dashing obliquely down the slope. Over 

 fallen steeds and heaps of the dead she leaped with 

 a motion as airy as that of the flying fox, when, 

 fresh and unjaded, he leads away from the hounds, 

 whose sudden cry has broken him off from hunt- 

 ing mice amid the bogs of the meadow. So this 

 riderless horse came vaulting along. Now from my 

 earliest boyhood I have had what horsemen call a 

 ' weakness ' for horses. Only give me a colt of 

 wild, irregular temper and fierce blood to tame, 

 and I am perfectly happy. Never did lash of 

 mine, singing with cruel sound through the air, 

 fall on such a colt's soft hide. Never did yell or 

 kick send his hot blood from heart to head delug- 

 ing his sensitive brain with fiery currents, driving 



