emendous width of the stage of the
prospective drama. The voices of the guns, slightly casual, unexcited in
their challenges and warnings, could not destroy the unutterable
eloquence of the word in the air, a meaning of impending struggle which
made the breath halt at the lips.

The column in the roadway was ankle-deep in mud. The men swore piously
at the rain which drizzled upon them, compelling them to stand always
very erect in fear of the drops that would sweep in under their
coat-collars. The fog was as cold as wet cloths. The men stuffed their
hands deep in their pockets, and huddled their muskets in their arms.
The machinery of orders had rooted these soldiers deeply into the mud
precisely as almighty nature roots mullein stalks.

They listened and speculated when a tumult of fighting came from the dim
town across the river. When the noise lulled for a time they resumed
their descriptions of the mud and graphically exaggerated the number of
hours they had been kept waiting. The general commanding their division
rode along the ranks, and they cheered admiringly, affectionately,
crying out to him gleeful prophecies of the coming battle. Each man
scanned him with a peculiarly keen personal interest, and afterward
spoke of him with unquestioning devotion and confidence, narrating
anecdotes which were mainly untrue.

When the jokers lifted the shrill voices which invariably belonged to
them, flinging witticisms at their comrades, a loud laugh would sweep
from rank to rank, and soldiers who had not heard would lean forward and
demand repetition. When were borne past them some wounded men with gray
and blood-smeared faces, and eyes that rolled in that helpless
beseeching for assistance from the sky which comes with supreme pain,
the soldiers in the mud watched intently, and from time to time asked of
the bearers an account of the affair. Frequently they bragged of their
corps, their division, their brigade, their regiment. Anon they referred
to the mud and the cold drizzle. Upon this threshold of a wild scene of
death they, in short, defied the proportion of events with that
splendour of heedlessness which belongs only to veterans.

"Like a lot of wooden soldiers," swore Billie Dempster, moving his feet
in the thick mass, and casting a vindictive glance indefinitely;
"standing in the mud for a hundred years."

"Oh, shut up!" murmured his brother Dan. The manner of his words implied
that this fraternal voice near hi