The Blue Balloon: A Tale of the Shenandoah Valley

Thirty-three years ago, or, to be quite exact, in the month of May 1862, the great civil war in the United States of America was in full swing. The Federals had discovered that their boast that they would finish the whole affair in ninety days had been an empty one; while the Confederates, brave as they were, and fighting with all the vigor of men goaded to fury by the horrors of invasion, where learning by slow degrees, and in the teeth of their successes, that one Southerner could not whip five Yankees.