140 Southern Historical Society Papers.
division at Chambersburg as the rear guard. Cashtown is a village- cm the eastern side of the low mountain range, which runs north and south. Eight miles east is the town of Gettysburg, a topo- graphical centre, with roads from west and northwest meeting roads from the south and east.
GETTYSBURG.
It was a small town of about three thousand people, in middle Pennsylvania, but ten or twelve miles north of the Maryland line. It was in the middle of a fertile and picturesque country. To the west, sloping over the rising ridges of well cultivated farms, and to the east, a broken land of rocky ridges and small cove-shaped mountains of rudely broken stone. On the western slopes are the College and the Theological Seminary, which give character some- what to the town. Quiet and retired, no one in Gettysburg dreamed of any coming battle, nor of the pathetic, and undying fame that would come to the peaceful place. Neither General Lee nor General Meade ever thought of making it a battlefield, nor that its village cemetery would be the centre of a greater city of the dead, and the burying place of the hopes of a new Confed- ercy of the States of the South.
GENERAL LEE ON THE FIELD.
On July ist, General Lee and staff rode east from Cashtown and about three miles from Gettysburg, coming into the open country, he came in sight of the first day's battle. Turning into a grass field on his left he sat on his well-bred iron gray, Traveller, and looked across the fields eastward, through the smoke rising in puffs and long rolls. He held his glasses in his hand and looked down the long slope by the Seminary, over the town to the rug- ged heights beyond. A rod or two away, I sat in my saddle and caught the picture which has not faded from memory, and grows more distinct as the years go by. He was fifty-six years old, with a superb physique, five feet and eleven and one-half inches in height, about one hundred and seventy-five pounds in weight, and in perfect health. His son, Captain Lee, writes, "I never re- member his being ill." He was a gentleman by blood and breed- ing, so truly that he was unmindful of it. He was plain and neat in his uniform of gray, so careful of his dress that there was noth- ing to attract attention. He wore a hat of grey felt, with medium brim and his boots fitted neatly, coming to his knee with a border
