A battery of artillery
followed, the cannoneers riding with folded arms
on limber and caisson. And still the interminable
procession came out of the obscurity to south and
passed into the obscurity to north, with never a
sound of voice, nor hoof, nor wheel.
The man could not rightly understand: he thought
himself deaf; said so, and heard his own voice, al-
though it had an unfamiliar quality that almost
alarmed him; it disappointed his ear's expectancy in
the matter of timbre and resonance. But he was not
deaf, and that for the moment sufficed.
Then he remembered that there are natural phe-
nomena to which some one has given the name
'acoustic shadows.' If you stand in an acoustic
shadow there is one direction from which you will
hear nothing. At the battle of Gaines's Mill, one of
the fiercest conflicts of the Civil War, with a
hundred guns in play, spectators a mile and a half
away on the opposite side of the Chickahominy Val-
ley heard nothing of what they clearly saw. The
bombardment of Port Royal, heard and felt at St.
Augustine, a hundred and fifty miles to the south,
was inaudible two miles to the north in a still at-
mosphere. A few days before the surrender at Ap-
pomattox a thunderous engagement between the
commands of Sheridan and Pickett was unknown to
the latter commander, a mile in the rear of his own
line.
These instances were not known to the man of
whom we write, but less striking ones of the same
character had not escaped his observation.
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