and plucking at my shawl. I was very afraid, so I crept off
into a dark corner and sat down on a box with my carpet-bag and basket.
The men drove off with their carriages, but there were half a dozen
others under a shed quarrelling. I sat there an hour, thinking surely
Joe would be along. Then the clock struck two: I got up and went to the
men under the shed. I said to them, 'Do you know Joseph Carrol?'

"The men raised up from where they were lying, and stared at me. I'm
afraid, Sir, they had been drinking. So I said it again. They laughed
and began to make jokes about me, I cried a little,--I couldn't help it,
Sir. I knew the Lord Jesus was near me, but I couldn't help it. One of
the men, whose clothes were the raggedest and whose face was very red,
said,--

"'Boys, I guess you're mistaken. Who are you, my girl?'

"I told them I was Joseph Carrol's sister, and how it was I had come to
find him.

"'You'll have to help me, Sir,' I said to the red-faced man; 'for I have
a trouble in my head often, and it seems as if it was a-coming soon.'

"Some of the men laughed again, but the man I had spoken to got up and
buttoned his coat. He had to lean against the fence, he was so unsteady.

"'You stop that jeering, Jim Flynn,' he says, swearing. 'Can't you see
what the girl is? Where's your money, Ellen?'

"Then it was I found my money was gone. I remembered putting it on the
seat beside me before we changed cars at Urbanna. So I told him. He
looked at me steady.

"'I believe you,' he says. 'Come along. The Twenty-Fourth Ohio is out in
Camp Chase,--four miles out. You come to an hotel to-night and go out to
Joe in the morning.'

"So he took me up to a big house, and said to a man there that I was a
decent girl, and gave him money to pay for my bed and breakfast, and bid
me good-night."

Early in the morning Ellen dressed herself neatly, "to please Joe," and
started out to the camp, carrying her basket, asking her way as she
went. The girl had wrought herself up now to such a certainty of seeing
him that a disappointment was sure to be a new and different shock from
any that had gone before. I suppose, too, the novel sight of the tents,
the crowds of armed men, excited her feeble mind beyond its powers. She
came to the gate and asked the sentry to tell Joseph Carrol of the
Twenty-Fourth Ohio that his sister had come.

"It would need a long call to do that, my girl," said the man. "The
Twenty-Fourth went off to active