a pace or two,
like a drunken man, and then stood stock-still, his eyes fixed upon the
road.

"Quick march!" said the sergeant.

The soldiers stepped out again; and as we turned the angle of the road,
about a mile farther, I beheld Kelly still standing in the self same
attitude we left him. Barton, after some order to the sergeant, soon
left us, and we continued our march till near nine o'clock, when the
party halted to breakfast. They pressed me to eat with every kind
entreaty, but I could taste nothing, and we resumed our road after half
an hour. But the day becoming oppressively hot, it was deemed better to
defer our march till near sunset; we stopped, then, during the noon,
in a shady thicket near the roadside, where the men, unbuckling their
knapsacks and loosening their stocks, lay down in the deep grass, either
chatting together or smoking. The sergeant made many attempts to draw
me into conversation, but my heart was too full of its own sensations
either to speak or listen; so he abandoned the pursuit with a good
grace, and betook himself to his pipe at the foot of a tree, where,
after its last whiff escaped, he sank into a heavy sleep.

Such of the party as were not disposed for sleep gathered together in
a little knot on a small patch of green grass, in the middle of a beech
clump, where, having arranged themselves with as much comfort as the
place permitted, they began chatting away over their life and its
adventures pleasantly and freely. I was glad to seek any distraction
from my own gloomy thoughts in listening to them, as I lay only a few
yards off; but though I endeavored with all my might to attend to and
take interest in their converse, my thoughts always turned to him I had
lost forever,--the first, the only friend I had ever known. All care for
myself and what fortune awaited me was merged in my sorrow for him. If
not indifferent to my fate, I was at least unmindful of it, and although
the words of those near me fell upon my ear, I neither heard nor marked
them.

From this dreamy lethargy I was at last suddenly aroused by the hearty
bursts of laughter that broke from the party, and a loud clapping of
hands that denoted their applause of something or somebody then before
them.

"I say, George," said one of the soldiers, "he's a queer 'un, too, that
piper."

"Yes, he 's a droll chap," responded the other solemnly, as he rolled
forth a long curl of smoke from the angle of his mouth.

"Can you