Much more usually than their opponents, the American refugees sought for honorable distinction in their desultory contests; but it would be a strange anomaly in civil war, if the volunteer soldier never prosecuted retaliation for private wrong and did not sometimes condescend to sweep away from the hostile marches, whatever was valuable. The British refugees were the more numerous, and their excursions the more frequent and successful, during the first years of the war; but before its close the tide had turned in favor of their antag-onists, whose services had made them popular, and whose ranks were filled with the patriotic and the enterprising. As soon as the British and the American refugees had been arrayed against each other, hostile parties were constantly hovering about the alternate borders. Encounters, both accidental and premeditated, grew out of these continued movements. The combatants most usually were horsemen and notwithstanding the moral degeneracy caused by civil war, not unfrequently exhibited a deportment, such as an-cient stories assign to chivalry. Ordinarily they piqued them-selves upon the point of honor and were generous to captives. Every steed, it is true, that was fit for a troopers mounting, was considered a lawful prize; but in extenuation they con-tended, that the urgent wants of the King or the necessities of the States, gave a sanction to such captures. With this exception, the hands of many, perhaps most of them, were unstained by plunder. Great rivalry sprang up between the champions of the opposite parties, who were sometimes kins-men, and often, either as friends or as foes, well known to each other. Under these circumstances challenges were sometimes given and accepted, and combats, both single and between adversaries of equal numbers, were fought: not unlike those that romance loves to dwell upon when she speaks of Roland or Almanzar, and recounts passages at arms which took place along the slopes of Roncesvalles, or encounters that happened on the plains of Alarcos.