Delighted with our success and gallantry, we again mounted our caissons and entered the town at a trot. The people had been under Northern rule for a long time, and were rejoiced to greet their friends. I heard a very old lady say to a little girl, as we drove by, "Oh, dear! if your father was just here, to see this!" The young ladies were standing on the sides of the streets, and, as our guns rattled by, would reach out to hand us some of the dainties from their baskets; but we had had plenty, so they could not reach far enough. The excitement over, we went into camp in a pretty piece of woods two miles below the town and six from Harper's Ferry. Here we spent several days pleasantly.
Mayor Middleton, of our town, Lexington, had followed us with a wagon-load of boxes of edibles from home. So many of the company had been wounded or left behind that the rest of us had a double share. Gregory's box, which Middleton brought from the railroad, contained a jar of delicious pickle. I had never relished it before, but camp-life had created a craving for it that seemed insatiable. The cows of the neighborhood seemed to have a curiosity to see us, and would stroll around the camp and stand kindly till a canteen could be filled with rich milk, which could soon be cooled in a convenient spring. Just outside of Charlestown lived the Ransons, who had formerly lived near Lexington and were great friends of my father's family. I called to see them. Buck, the second son, was then about fifteen and chafing to go into the army. I took a clean shave with his razor, which he used daily to encourage his beard and shorten his stay in Jericho. He treated me to a flowing goblet of champagne and gave me a lead-colored knit jacket, with a blue border, in which I felt quite fine, and wore through the rest of the campaign. It was known in the mess as my "Josey." Buck eventually succeeded in getting in, and now bears the scars of three saber-cuts on his head.
It was raining the day we broke camp and started toward Winchester, but our march was enlivened by the addition of a new recruit in the person of Steve Dandridge. He was about sixteen and had just come from the Virginia Military Institute, where he had been sent to be kept out of the army. He wore a cadet-cap which came well over the eyes and nose, and left a mass of brown, curly hair unprotected on the back of his head. His joy at being "mustered in" was irrepressible. He had no ear for music, was really "too good-natured to strike a tune," but the songs he tried to sing would have made a "dog laugh." Within an hour after his arrival he was on intimate terms with everybody and knew and called us all by our first names.