g mist, creeping along the valley, prevented any further
observation, and bade fair to interrupt their own communications with
the camp. Everything was quiet in the west, although the enemy's lines
along the ridge seemed to have receded.

Brant had listened impatiently, for a new idea had seized him. Hooker
was of the party, and was the one man in whom he could partly confide,
and obtain a disguise. He at once made his way to the commissary
wagons--one of which he knew Hooker used as a tent. Hastily telling him
that he wished to visit the pickets without recognition, he induced him
to lend him his slouched hat and frock coat, leaving with him his own
distinguishing tunic, hat, and sword. He resisted the belt and pistols
which Hooker would have forced upon him. As he left the wagon he
was amusedly conscious that his old companion was characteristically
examining the garments he had left behind with mingled admiration and
envy. But he did not know, as he slipped out of the camp, that Mr.
Hooker was quietly trying them on, before a broken mirror in the
wagon-head!

The gray light of that summer morning was already so strong that, to
avoid detection, he quickly dropped into the shadow of the gully that
sloped towards the Run. The hot mist which the scouts had seen was now
lying like a tranquil sea between him and the pickets of the enemy's
rear-guard, which it seemed to submerge, and was clinging in moist
tenuous swathes--like drawn-out cotton wool--along the ridge, half
obliterating its face. From the valley in the rear it was already
stealing in a thin white line up the slope like the advance of a ghostly
column, with a stealthiness that, in spite of himself, touched him with
superstitious significance. A warm perfume, languid and treacherous--as
from the swamp magnolia--seemed to rise from the half-hidden marsh.
An ominous silence, that appeared to be a part of this veiling of all
things under the clear opal-tinted sky above, was so little like
the hush of rest and peace, that he half-yearned for the outburst of
musketry and tumult of attack that might dispel it. All that he had ever
heard or dreamed of the insidious South, with its languid subtleties of
climate and of race, seemed to encompass him here.

But the next moment he saw the figure he was waiting for stealing
towards him from the shadow of the gulley beneath the negro quarters.

Even in that uncertain light there was no mistaking the tall figure,
the gaudi