e
imagined, soon reduce his brother to a poignant sensitiveness.

At the top of the bank the column again halted and rearranged itself, as
a man after a climb rearranges his clothing. Presently the great
steel-backed brigade, an infinitely graceful thing in the rhythm and
ease of its veteran movement, swung up a little narrow, slanting street.

Evening had come so swiftly that the fighting on the remote borders of
the town was indicated by thin flashes of flame. Some building was on
fire, and its reflection upon the clouds was an oval of delicate pink.

II.

All demeanour of rural serenity had been wrenched violently from the
little town by the guns and by the waves of men which had surged through
it. The hand of war laid upon this village had in an instant changed it
to a thing of remnants. It resembled the place of a monstrous shaking of
the earth itself. The windows, now mere unsightly holes, made the
tumbled and blackened dwellings seem skeletons. Doors lay splintered to
fragments. Chimneys had flung their bricks everywhere. The artillery
fire had not neglected the rows of gentle shade-trees which had lined
the streets. Branches and heavy trunks cluttered the mud in drift-wood
tangles, while a few shattered forms had contrived to remain dejectedly,
mournfully upright. They expressed an innocence, a helplessness, which
perforce created a pity for their happening into this cauldron of
battle. Furthermore, there was under foot a vast collection of odd
things reminiscent of the charge, the fight, the retreat. There were
boxes and barrels filled with earth, behind which riflemen had lain
snugly, and in these little trenches were the dead in blue with the dead
in gray, the poses eloquent of the struggles for possession of the town
until the history of the whole conflict was written plainly in the
streets.

And yet the spirit of this little city, its quaint individuality, poised
in the air above the ruins, defying the guns, the sweeping volleys;
holding in contempt those avaricious blazes which had attacked many
dwellings. The hard earthen sidewalks proclaimed the games that had been
played there during long lazy days, in the careful shadows of the trees.
"General Merchandise," in faint letters upon a long board, had to be
read with a slanted glance, for the sign dangled by one end; but the
porch of the old store was a palpable legend of wide-hatted men,
smoking.

This subtle essence, this soul of the life t