s the gray blanket damp from the spray
of heavy rain against the canvas earlier in the night. Soon, with slow
dawn's approach, he could make out the dull white of his carbine and
sabre against the mud-plastered chimney. In that drear dimness the boy
shivered, with a sense of misery rather than from cold, and yearned as
only sleepy youth can for the ease of a true bed and dry warm swooning
to slumber. He was sustained by no mature sense that this too would
pass; it was with a certain bodily despair that he felt chafed and
compressed by his rough garments, and pitied himself, thinking how his
mother would cry if she could see him crouched so wretchedly that wet
March morning, pressed all the more into loneliness by the regular
breathing of veteran Bader in the indifference of deep sleep.

Harry's vision of his mother coming into his room, shading her candle
with her hand to see if he were asleep, passed away as a small gust
came, shaking the canvas, for he was instantly alert with a certainty
that the breeze had borne a strong rolling of musketry.

"Bader, Bader!" he said. "Bader!"

"Can't you shut up, you Wallbridge?" came Orderly Sergeant Gravely's
sharp tones from the next tent.

"What's wrong with you, Harry, boy?" asked Bader, turning.

"I thought I heard heavy firing closer than the picket lines; twice
now I've thought I heard it."

"Oh, I guess not, Harry. The Johnnies won't come out no such night as
this. Keep quiet, or you'll have the sergeant on top of you. Better
lie down and try to sleep, buddy; the bugles will call morning soon
now."

Again Harry fell to his revery of home, and his vision became that of
the special evening on which his boyish wish to go to the war had, for
the family's sake, become resolve. He saw his mother's spectacled and
lamp-lit face as she, leaning to the table, read in the familiar
Bible; little Fred and Mary, also facing the table's central lamp,
bent sleepy heads over their school-books; the father sat in the
rocking-chair, with his right hand on the paper he had laid down, and
gazed gloomily at the coals fallen below the front doors of the
wood-burning stove. Harry dreamed himself back in his own chair,
looking askance, and feeling sure his father was inwardly groaning
over the absence of Jack, the eldest son. Then nine o'clock struck,
and Fred and Mary began to put their books away in preparation for
bed.

"Wait a little, children," Mrs. Wallbridge said, serene in tone fr