--which was plump as an apple-dumpling tolerably well. It was left
for the tail-enders of the company to draw trousers that were six inches
too long or too short, and blouses that either wouldn't reach around,
and left yawning chasms in front, or were so large that they looked as
if they were hung on bean-poles.

Of course, Si couldn't be expected to do any more plodding farm work,
now that he had "jined" the army. While the company was filling up he
spent most of his time on dress parade in the village near by, eliciting
admiring smiles from all the girls, and an object of the profoundest awe
and wonder to tha small boys.

One day Si was sitting on the sugar-barrel in the corner grocery,
gnawing a "blind robin," and telling how he thought the war wouldn't
last long after the 200th Ind. got down there and took a hand and got
fairly interested in the game; they would wind it up in short meter.
Such ardent emotions always seethed and bubbled in the swelling breasts
of the new troops when they came down to show the veterans just how to
do it.

One of the town boys who had been a year in the service, had got a
bullet through his arm in a skirmish, and was at home on furlough, came
into the store, and then took place the dialog between him and Si that
opens this chapter.

Si wondered a good deal what the veteran meant about the finger-nails.
He did not even know that there existed in any nature a certain active
and industrious insect which, before he had been in the army a great
while, would cause his heart to overflow with gratitude to a beneficent
Providence for providing him with nails on his fingers.

When the 200th left Indiana all the boys had, of course, brand-new
outfits right from Uncle Sam's great one-price clothing house. Their
garments were nice and clean, their faces well washed, and their hair
yet showed marks of the comb. At Louisville they stuck up their noses,
with a lofty consciousness of superiority, at the sight of Buell's
tanned and ragged tramps, who had just come up on the gallop from
Tennessee and northern Alabama.

[Illustration: "SAY, CAP, WHAT KIND O' BUG IS THIS?" 099 ]

If the new Hoosier regiment had been quartered for a while in long-used
barracks, or had pitched its tents in an old camp, Si would very soon
have learned, in the school of experience, the delightful uses of
finger-nails. But the 200th stayed only a single night in Louisville
and then joined the procession that started on