they can accomplish and with so few and ill assortment of tools when the necessity arises.  To guard against the shells that were continually dropping in our midst or outside of our works, the soldiers began burrowing like rabbits in rear of our earthworks and building covered ways from their breastwork to the ground below.  In a few days men could go the length of a regiment without being exposed in the least, crawling along the tunnels all dug with bayonets, knives, and a few wornout shovels.  At some of these angles the passer-by would be exposed, and in going from one opening to another, only taking the fraction of a second to accomplish, a bullet would come whizzing from some unseen source, either to the right or left.  As soon as one of these openings under a covered way would be darkened by some one passing, away a bullet would come singing in the aperture, generally striking the soldier passing through.  So annoying and dangerous had the practice become of shooting in our works from an unseen source that a detail of ten or twenty men was sent out under Lieutenant D.J.  Griffith, of the Fifteenth, to see if the concealed enemy might not be located and an end put to the annoyance.  Griffith and his men crept along cautiously in the underbrush, while some of our men would wave a blanket across the exposed places in the breastwork to draw the Federal fire, while Griffith and his detail kept a sharp lookout.  It was not long before they discovered the hidden “Yank” perched in the top of a tall gum tree, his rifle resting in the fork of a limb.  Griffith got as close as he well could without danger of being detected by some one under the tree.  When all was ready they sighted their rifles at the fellow up the tree and waited his next fire.  When it did come I expect that Yankee and his comrades below were the worst surprised of any throughout the war; for no sooner had his gun flashed than ten rifles rang out in answer and the fellow fell headlong to the ground, a distance of fifty feet or more.  Beating the air with his hands and feet, grasping at everything within sight or reach, his body rolling and tumbling among the limbs of the tree, his head at times up, at others down, till at last he strikes the earth, and with a terrible rebound in the soft spongy needles Mr.  “Yank” lies still, while Griffith and his men take to their heels.  It was not known positively whether he was killed or not, but one thing Lieutenant Griffith and his men were sure of—­one Yankee, at least, had been given a long ride in midair.

After Grant’s repulse at Cold Harbor he gave up all hopes of reaching Richmond by direct assault and began his memorable change of base.  Crossing the James River at night he undertook the capture of Petersburg by surprise.  It appears from contemporaneous history that owing to some inexcusable blunders on our part Grant came very near accomplishing his designs.