ent, then nodded and the horse and the rider were
gone. It was late--nearly midnight. The firing on both sides had
nearly ceased,--only a desultory rattling--the boom of a gun now and
then. But O, the agony, the death, the wild confusion! This was
something like the babel that greeted the old soldier's ears as he
rode forward:

"The Fourth Mississippi--where is the Fourth Mississippi?" "Here is
the Fortieth Alabama's standard--rally men to your standard!" "Where
is General Cleburne, men? Who has seen General Cleburne?" "Up, boys,
and let us at 'em agin! Damn 'em, they've wounded me an' I want to
kill some more!"

"Water!--water--for God's sake give us water!" This came from a pile
of wounded men just under the guns on the Columbia pike. It came from
a sixteen year old boy in blue. Four dead comrades lay across him.

"And this is the curse of it," said General Travis, as he rode among
the men.

But suddenly amid the smoke and confusion, the soldiers saw what many
thought was an apparition--an old, old warrior, on a horse with black
mane and tail and fiery eyes, but elsewhere covered with white sweat
and pale as the horse of death. The rider's face too, was deadly
white, but his keen eyes blazed with the fire of many generations of
battle-loving ancestors.

The soldiers flocked round him, half doubting, half believing. The
terrible ordeal of that bloody night's work; the poignant grief from
beholding the death and wounds of friends and brothers; the weird,
uncanny groans of the dying upon the sulphurous-smelling night air;
the doubt, uncertainty, and yet, through it all, the bitter
realization that all was in vain, had shocked, benumbed, unsettled
the nerves of the stoutest; and many of them scarcely knew whether
they were really alive, confronting in the weird hours of the night
ditches of blood and breastworks of death, or were really dead--dead
from concussion, from shot or shell, and were now wandering on a
spirit battle-field till some soul-leader should lead them away.

And so, half dazed and half dreaming, and yet half alive to its
realization, they flocked around the old warrior, and they would not
have been at all surprised had he told them he came from another
world.

Some thought of Mars. Some thought of death and his white horse. Some
felt of the animal's mane and touched his streaming flanks and cordy
legs to see if it were really a horse and not an apparition, while
"What is it?" and "Who is he?" w