than dreary. The regiment was the object of universal interest in
the town. Base-ball and the alluring outdoor pastimes that now divert
the dawdlers of cities were unknown. Hence the camp-ground of the
Caribees was the matinee, ball-match, tennis, boating, all in one of the
idle afternoon world of Warchester. At parade and battalion drill the
scene was like the race-ground on gala days.

All the fine equipages of the town drew up in the roads and lanes
flanking the camp, where with leveled glasses the mothers, sisters, and
sweethearts watched the columns as they skirmished, formed squares, or
"passed the defile," quite sure that the rebels would fly in confusion
before such surprising manoeuvres. This daily audience stimulated such a
fierce rivalry among the companies that the men turned out at all hours
of the day to drill and practice in squads, rather than loiter about the
camp. One day great news aroused the camp: the Governor was to review
the regiment and send it to the front. All Warchester poured out to the
Holly Hills, and when at five o'clock the companies filed out on the
shining green there was such a cheer that the men felt repaid for the
tiresome wait of months. The civic commander-in-chief watched the
movements with affable scrutiny, surrounded by a profusely uniformed
staff, to whom he expressed the most politic approval. He was heard to
remark that no such soldiers had been seen on this continent since Scott
had marched to Lundy's Lane.

There was a throb of passionate joy in the ranks when this eulogium
reached the men, for the words were hardly spoken when they were known
in every company by that mysterious telegraphy which makes the human
body a conductor swift as an electric wire among large masses of men.
Nor were the words less relished that the eulogist was as ignorant of
military excellence as a Malay of the uses of a patent mower. The men,
it was easy to see, were much more efficient in movement than the
officers in handling them. Colonel Oswald had wasted weeks in the study
of the occult evolutions of the battalion; they were still a maddening
mystery to him that fatal day. For six weeks his dreams had been haunted
by airy battalions filing over impossible defiles. The commands he gave
that day would have thrown the companies into hopeless confusion had the
junior officers not boldly substituted the right ones for the colonel's
blunders. This, however, passed unnoted, for the crowds, and even