ing bunting by day and with
torches of fire by night.

From her window in the emergency hospital the Special Messenger could
see those flags as she sat pensively sewing. Sometimes she mended the
remnants of her silken stockings and the last relics of the fine under
linen left her; sometimes she scraped lint or sewed poultice bandages,
or fashioned havelocks for regiments southward bound.

She had grown slimmer, paler, of late; her beautiful hair had been
sheared close; her head, covered with thick, clustering curls, was like
the shapely head of a boy. Limbs and throat were still smooth and round,
but had become delicate almost to leanness.

The furlough she had applied for had not yet arrived; she seemed to
remain as hopelessly entangled in the web of war as ever, watching,
without emotion, the old spider. Death, busy all around her, tireless,
sinister, absorbed in his own occult affairs.

The routine varied but little: at dawn surgeons' call chorused by the
bugles; files of haggard, limping, clay-faced men, headed by sergeants,
all converging toward the hospital; later, in every camp, drums awaking;
distant strains of regimental bands at parade; and all day and all night
the far rumble of railroad trains, the whistle of locomotives, and, if
the wind veered, the faint, melancholy cadence of the bells swinging for
a clear track and right of way.

Sometimes, sewing by the open window, she thought of her brother, now
almost thirteen--thought, trembling, of his restless letters from his
Northern school, demanding of her that he be permitted to take his part
in war for the Union, begging to be enlisted at least as drummer in a
nine-months' regiment which was recruiting within sight of the dormitory
where he fretted over Caesar and the happy warriors of the Tenth Legion.

Sometimes, mending the last shreds of her cambric finery, she thought of
her girlhood, of the white porches at Sandy River; and always, always,
the current of her waking dream swung imperceptibly back to that swift
crisis in her life--a flash of love--love at the first glance--a word!
and his regiment, sabres glittering, galloping pell-mell into the
thundering inferno between the hills.... And sunset; and the wounded
passing by wagon loads, piled in the blood-soaked hay; and the glimpse
of his limp gold-and-yellow sleeve--and her own white bed, and her lover
of a day lying there--dead----

At this point in the dream-tale her eyes usually became too di