led with a tiresome routine of laborious drills alternating with
tedious roll-calls, and wearisome parades and inspections; it requires
pleased contentment with walks continually cut short by the camp-guard,
and with amusements limited to rough horse-play on the parade-ground,
and dull games of cards by sputtering candles in the tent.

As these be tastes and preferences notably absent from the mind of the
average young man, our volunteers usually regard their experience in
Camp of Instruction as among the most unpleasant of their war memories.

These were the trials that tested Harry Glen's resolution sorely.
When he enlisted with the intention of redeeming himself, he naturally
expected that the opportunity he desired would be given by a prompt
march to the field, and a speedy entrance into an engagement. He nerved
himself strenuously for the dreadful ordeal of battle, but this became
a continually receding point. The bitter defeat at Bull Run was bearing
fruit in months of painstaking preparation before venturing upon another
collision.

Day by day he saw the chance of retrieving his reputation apparently
more remote. Meanwhile discouragements and annoyances grew continually
more plentiful and irksome. He painfully learned that the most
disagreeable part of war is not the trial of battle, but the daily
sacrifices of personal liberty, tastes, feelings and conveniences
involved in camp-life, and in the reduction of one's cherished
individuality to the dead-level of a passive, obedient, will-less
private soldier.

"I do wish the regiment would get orders to move!" said almost hourly
each one of a half-million impatient youths fretting in Camps of
Instruction through the long Summer of 1861.

"I do wish the regiment would get orders to move!" said Harry Glen
angrily one evening, on coming into the Surgeon's tent to have his
blistered hands dressed. He had been on fatigue duty during the day, and
the Fatigue-Squad had had an obstinate struggle with an old oak stump,
which disfigured the parade-ground, and resisted removal like an Irish
tenant.

"I am willing--yes, I can say I am anxious, even--to go into battle," he
continued, while Dr. Paul Denslow laid plasters of simple cerate on
the abraded palms, and then swathed them in bandages. "Anything is
preferable to this chopping tough stumps with a dull ax, and drilling
six hours a day while the thermometer hangs around the nineties."

"I admit that there are things w