r heart, body, and brain. Almost
each man is an athlete. It is the finest body of men on God Almighty's
earth to-day, and everybody on earth but the American and the Spaniard
knows it. And how this nation has treated them. Think of that miserable
Congress--" Grafton waved his hands in impotent rage and ceased--Rivers
was calling them from the top of the hill.

So all morning Crittenden watched the regimental unit at work. He took a
sabre lesson from the old Sergeant. He visited camps of infantry and
artillery and, late that afternoon, he sat on a little wooded hill,
where stood four draped, ghost-like statues--watching these units paint
pictures on a bigger canvas below him, of the army at work as a whole.

Every green interspace below was thickly dotted with tents and rising
spirals of faint smoke; every little plain was filled with soldiers, at
drill. Behind him wheeled cannon and caisson and men and horses,
splashed with prophetic drops of red, wheeling at a gallop, halting,
unlimbering, loading, and firing imaginary shells at imaginary
Spaniards--limbering and off with a flash of metal, wheel-spoke and
crimson trappings at a gallop again; in the plain below were regiments
of infantry, deploying in skirmish-line, advancing by rushes; beyond
them sharpshooters were at target practice, and little bands of recruits
and awkward squads were everywhere. In front, rose cloud after cloud of
dust, and, under them, surged cloud after cloud of troopers at mounted
drill, all making ready for the soldier's work--to kill with mercy and
die without complaint. What a picture--what a picture! And what a rich
earnest of the sleeping might of the nation behind it all. Just under
him was going an "escort of the standard," which he could plainly see.
Across the long drill-ground the regiment--it was Rivers's
regiment--stood, a solid mass of silent, living statues, and it was a
brave sight that came now--that flash of sabres along the long length of
the drill-field, like one leaping horizontal flame. It was a regimental
acknowledgment of the honour of presentation to the standard, and
Crittenden raised his hat gravely in recognition of the same honour,
little dreaming that he was soon to follow that standard up a certain
Cuban hill.

What a picture!

There the nation was concentrating its power. Behind him that nation was
patching up its one great quarrel, and now a gray phantom stalked out of
the past to the music of drum and fife, a