from the rough-spoken common soldier: "General Lee would come up and spend hours studying the situation with his splendid glasses ; and the glorious Stuart would dash up, always with a lady, and a pretty one, too. I wonder if the girl is yet alive who rode the general's fine horse and raced with him to charge our station. When they had reached the level platform, and Stuart had left her in care of one of us and took the other off to one side and questioned the very sweat out of him about the enemy's position, he was General Stuart then, but when he got back and lifted the beauty into the saddle and rode off humming a breezy air . . . he was Stuart the beau." 64
And the women liked Stuart. It was a grand thing to be the first officer in the Confederate cavalry, with a blue eye and a fair beard, and all gold, like Horace's Lydia, from hat to spurs. When he rode singing and laughing into a little town, "by river or seashore," they flocked to meet him, young and old, and touched his garments, and begged his buttons and kissed his gloved hands, until he suggested that his cheeks were available, and then they kissed those, young and old alike. 65 They showered him with flowers also, buried him under nosegays and garlands, till he rode like old god Bacchus or the queen of May. What an odd fashion of making war! And the best I have met with is, that one day Stuart described one of these occurrences to his great chieftain. "I had to wear her garland, till I was out of sight," apologized the
