olitic to make a soldier of.

We were just leaving, when a face attracted me, and I stopped the party.
"That is the true Southern type," I said to my companion. A young
fellow, a little over twenty, rather tall, slight, with a perfectly
smooth, boyish cheek, delicate, somewhat high features, and a fine,
almost feminine mouth, stood at the opening of his tent, and as we
turned towards him fidgeted a little nervously with one hand at the
loose canvas, while he seemed at the same time not unwilling to talk. He
was from Mississippi, he said, had been, at Georgetown College, and was
so far imbued with letters that even the name of the literary humility
before him was not new to his ears. Of course I found it easy to come
into magnetic relation with him, and to ask him without incivility
what _he_ was fighting for. "Because I like the excitement of it," he
answered.--I know those fighters with women's mouths and boys' cheeks;
one such from the circle of my own friends, sixteen years old, slipped
away from his nursery and dashed in under an assumed name among the
red-legged Zouaves, in whose company he got an ornamental bullet-mark in
one of the earliest conflicts of the war.

"Did you ever see a genuine Yankee?" said my Philadelphia friend to the
young Mississippian.

"I have shot at a good many of them," he replied, modestly, his woman's
mouth stirring a little, with a pleasant, dangerous smile.

The Dutch captain here put his foot into the conversation, as his
ancestors used to put theirs into the scale, when they were buying furs
of the Indians by weight,--so much for the weight of a hand, so much for
the weight of a foot. It deranged the balance of our intercourse; there
was no use in throwing a fly where a paving-stone had just splashed into
the water, and I nodded a good-bye to the boy-fighter, thinking how
much pleasanter it was for my friend the Captain to address him with
unanswerable arguments and crushing statements in his own tent than
it would be to meet him on some remote picket and offer his fair
proportions to the quick eye of a youngster who would draw a bead on him
before he had time to say _dunder and blixum_.

We drove back to the town. No message. After dinner still no message.
Dr. Cuyler, Chief Army-Hospital Inspector, is in town, they say. Let us
hunt him up,--perhaps he can help us.

We found him at the Jones House. A gentleman of large proportions, but
of lively temperament, his frame knit in th