r might be disagreeable in it would
fall to some one else's lot, and he continue to have the same pleasant
exemption that had been his good fortune so far through life.

And though the company was unexpectedly ordered to the field in the
rugged mountains of Western Virginia, instead of to pleasant quarters
about Washington, there was nothing to shake this comfortable belief.
The slack discipline of the first three months' service, and the
confusion of ideas that prevailed in the beginning of the war as to
military duties and responsibilities, enabled him to spend all the
time he chose away from his company and with congenial spirits, about
headquarters, and to make of the expedition, so far as he was concerned,
a pleasant picnic. Occasionally little shadows were thrown by the sight
of corpses brought in, with ugly-looking bullet holes in head or breast,
but these were always of the class he looked down upon, and he connected
their bad luck in some way with their condition in life. Doubtless some
one had to go where there was danger of being shot, as some one had
to dig ditches and help to pry wagons out of the mud, but there was
something rather preposterous in the thought that anything of this kind
was incumbent upon him.

The mutterings of the men against an officer, who would not share their
hardships and duties, did not reach his ears, nor yet the gibes of the
more earnest of the officers at the "young headquarter swells," whose
interest and zeal were nothing to what they would have taken in a
fishing excursion.

It came about very naturally and very soon that this continual avoidance
of duty in directions where danger might be encountered was stigmatized
by the harsher name of cowardice. Neither did this come to his
knowledge, and he was consequently ignorant that he had delivered a
fatal stab to his reputation one fine morning when, the regiment being
ordered out with three days' rations and forty rounds of cartridges, the
sergeant who was sent in search of him returned and reported that he
was sick in his tent. Jacob Alspaugh expressed the conclusion instantly
arrived at by every one in the regiment:

"It's all you could expect of one of them kid-glove fellers, to weaken
when it came to serious business."

Harry's self-sufficiency had left so little room for anything that did
not directly concern his own comfort, that he could not understand the
deadly earnestness of the men he saw file out of camp, or that