ins yet a few drops which escaped thy ravenous thirst."

Kent turned the canteen upside down and placed its mouth upon his
tongue. "No," he said, with deep dejection, "all that delicious fluid of
yesterday is now like the Father of his Country."

"Eh?" asked Abe, puzzled.

"Because it is no more--it is no more. It belongs to the unreturning
past."

"I say," he continued after a moment's pause, "let's go out and hunt for
some, there must be plenty in this neighborhood. Nature never makes a
want without providing something to supply it. Therefore, judging from
my thirst, this country ought to be full of distilleries."

They buckled on their belts, picked up their guns and started out,
directing their steps to the front.

In spite of the sunshine the walk through the battle-field was
depressing. A chafing wind fretted through the naked limbs of the oaks
and chestnuts, and drew moans from the pines and the hemlocks. The
brown, dead leaves rustled into little tawny hillocks, behind protecting
logs and rocks. Frequently those took on the shape of long, narrow
mounds as if they covered the graves of some ill-fated being, who like
themselves, had fallen to the earth to rot in dull obscurity. The clear
little streams that in Summer-time murmured musically down the slopes,
under canopies of nodding roses and fragrant sweet-brier, were now
turbid torrents, brawling like churls drunken with much wine, and
tearing out with savage wantonness their banks, matted with the roots of
the blue violets, and the white-flowered puccoon.

Scattered over the mountain-side were fatigue-parties engaged in hunting
up the dead, and burying them in shallow graves, hastily dug in clay so
red that it seemed as if saturated with the blood shed the day before.
The buriers thrust their hands into the pockets of the dead with the
flinching, nauseated air of men touching filth, and took from the
garments seeping with water and blood, watches, letters, ambrotypes,
money and trinkets, some of which they studied to gain a clue to the
dead man's identity, some retained as souvenirs, but threw the most back
into the grave with an air of loathing. The faces of the dead with their
staring eyes and open mouths and long, lank hair, cloyed with the sand
and mud thrown up by the beating rain, looked indescribably repulsive.

The buriers found it better to begin their work by covering the features
with a cap or a broad-brimmed hat. It was difficult for the coa