e campaign."

The temptation to believe that inanimate matter can be actuated by
obstinate malice is almost irresistible when one has to do with the long
skeins of black thread which the soldiers use for their sewing. These
skeins resolve themselves, upon the pulling of the first thread, into
bunches of entanglement more hopelessly perverse than the Gordian knot,
or the snarls in a child's hair. To the inexperienced victim, desirous
of securing the wherewithal to sew a button on, nothing seems easier
than to pull a thread out of the bunch of loose filament that lies
before him. Rash man! That simple mesh hat a baffling power like unto
the Labyrinth of Arsino, and long labor of fingers and teeth aided by
heated and improper language, frequently fails to extract so much as a
half foot of thread.

Abe had stuck his needle down into the log beside him. Near, were the
buttons he had fished out of his pocket, and he was laboring with clumsy
fingers and rising temper at an obdurate bunch of thread.

"I've been round looking over the field," said Kent, as he came up.

A contemptuous snort answered him.

"You ought to've been along. I saw a great many interesting things."

"O, yes, I s'pose. Awful interesting. Lot o' dead men laying around in
the mud. 'Bout as interesting, I should say, as a spell o' setting on a
Coroner's jury. The things you find interesting would bore anybody else
to death."

Abe gave the obstinate clump a savage twist which only made its knots
more rebellious, and he looked as if strongly tempted to throw it into
the fire.

"Don't do it, Abe," said Kent, with a laugh that irritated Abe worse
still. "Thread's thread, out here, a hundred miles from nowhere. You
don't know where you'll get any more. Save it--my dear fellow--save
it. Perchance you may yet sweetly beguile many an hour of your elegant
leisure in unraveling its fantastic convolutions with your taper
fingers, and----"

"Lord! Lord!" said Abe with an expression of deep weariness, but without
looking in Kent's direction, "Who's pulled the string o' that clack-mill
and set it going? When it gets started once it rolls out big words like
punkins dropping out o' the tail of a wagon going up hill. And there's
no way o' stopping it, either. You've just got to wiat till it runs
down."

"The Proverbs say so fittingly that 'A fool delighteth not in wise
instruction,'" said Kent, as he stepped around to the other side of the
fire. His foot fell upo