Before the huge cemetery which overlooks the site of the most violent fighting that occurred in the bloody and useless Battle of Fredericksburg, he paused briefly; then drove us to the field of Chancellorsville, to that of the Battles of the Wilderness, and finally to the region of Spottsylvania Courthouse; and at each important spot he stopped and told us what had happened there.

He knew all about the Civil War, that man, and he had a way of passing out his information with a calm assumption that his hearers knew nothing about it whatever.

This irritated my companion, who also knows all about the War, having once passed three days in the neighborhood of a Soldiers' Home.

Consequently he kept cutting in, supplying additional details--such, for instance, as that Stonewall Jackson, who died in a house which the driver pointed out, was shot by some of his own men, who took him for a Yankee as he was returning from a reconnaissance.
Either one of these competitive historians alone, I could have stood, but the way they picked each other up, fighting the old-time battles over again, got on my nerves.

Besides, it was cold, and as I have taken occasion to remark before, I do not like cold motor rides.