ad on a flat rock, another on a board, while a third had twisted his
dough around his ram-rod; if it were spring-time, a fourth might be
fitting his into a cornshuck to roast in ashes. All this Dan Dean could
do.

The roaring fire thickens the gloom of the woods where the lonely
pickets stand. Pipes are out now. An oracle outlines the general
campaign of the war as it will be and as it should have been. A
long-winded, innocent braggart tells of his personal prowess that day.
A little group is guying the new recruit. A wag shaves a bearded
comrade on one side of his face, pockets his razor and refuses to shave
the other side. A poet, with a bandaged eye, and hair like a windblown
hay-stack, recites "I am dying, Egypt--dying," and then a pure, clear,
tenor voice starts through the forest-aisles, and there is sudden
silence. Every man knows that voice, and loves the boy who owns
it--little Tom Morgan, Dan's brother-in-arms, the General's
seventeen-year-old brother--and there he stands leaning against a tree,
full in the light of the fire, a handsome, gallant figure--a song like
a seraph's pouring from his lips. One bearded soldier is gazing at him
with curious intentness, and when the song ceases, lies down with a
suddenly troubled face. He has seen the "death-look" in the boy's
eyes--that prophetic death-look in which he has unshaken faith. The
night deepens, figures roll up in blankets, quiet comes, and Dan lies
wide awake and deep in memories, and looking back on those early
helpless days of the war with a tolerant smile.

He was a war-worn veteran now, but how vividly he could recall that
first night in the camp of a big army, in the very woods where he now
lay--dusk settling over the Green River country, which Morgan's Men
grew to love so well; a mocking-bird singing a farewell song from the
top of a stunted oak to the dead summer and the dying day; Morgan
seated on a cracker-box in front of his tent, contemplatively chewing
one end of his mustache; Lieutenant Hunt swinging from his horse,
smiling grimly.

"It would make a horse laugh--a Yankee cavalry horse, anyhow--to see
this army."

Hunt had been over the camp that first afternoon on a personal tour of
investigation. They were not a thousand Springfield and Enfield rifles
at that time in Johnston's army. Half of the soldiers were armed with
shotguns and squirrel rifle and the greater part of the other half with
flintlock muskets. But nearly every man, thinkin