another county, a full-grown man,
weighing perhaps one hundred and seventy-five pounds, was a chronic
cry-baby; unfit for other service, he was assigned assistant at the
forge, and would lie with face to the ground and moan out, "I want to go
home, I want to go home," and sob by the hour.

Another, a primitive man from the German forests, whose language was
scarcely intelligible, lived entirely to himself and constructed his
shelter of brush and leaves--as would a bear preparing to hibernate. In
his ignorance of the use of an axe I saw him, in felling a tree, "throw"
it so that it fell on and killed a horse tied nearby. On seeing what he
had done, his lamentation over the dying animal was pathetic.

As a school for the study of human nature, that afforded in the various
conditions of army life is unsurpassed--a life in which danger,
fatigue, hunger, etc., leave no room for dissimulation, and expose the
good and bad in each individual to the knowledge of his associates.

It sometimes fell to my lot to be on guard-duty with Tom Martin, an
Irishman who was over forty-five and exempt from military service, but
was soldiering for the love of it. Sometimes he was very taciturn and
entirely absorbed with his short-stemmed pipe; at other times full of
humor and entertaining. He gave me an account, one night while on post,
of what he called his "great flank movement"--in other words, a visit to
his home in Rockbridge without leave. After Doran, another Irishman, had
been disabled at Malvern Hill and discharged from service, he became a
sort of huckster for the battery and would make trips to and from
Rockbridge with a wagon-load of boxes from our homes and also a supply
of apple-brandy. While camped at Bunker Hill in the fall of 1862,
shortly after Doran arrived with his load, Captain Poague, observing
more than an ordinary degree of hilarity among some of the men, had the
wagon searched, the brandy brought forth, confiscated, and emptied on
the ground. Martin, greatly outraged at the illtreatment of a fellow-son
of Erin, and still more so at the loss of so much good liquor, forthwith
resolved to take his revenge on the Captain by taking "French leave."

To escape the vigilance of provost-guards and deserter-hunters, he made
his way to the foothills of the North Mountain, and in the course of
his journey stumbled on a still-house in one of its secluded glens. To
the proprietor, who was making a run of apple-brandy, and who pro