in the grave,"

and then a Major ordered them out, and put a guard upon the building.
The guard played cards upon the door sills.

I was frequently obliged, by the crowded state of the roads, to turn
aside into woods, fens, and fields, and so make precarious progress.
Sometimes I strayed, unwittingly, a good way from the army, and
recovered the route with difficulty. On one of these occasions, I was
surprised by a person in civil dress, who seemed to shoot up out of the
ground. He was the queerest, grimmest, fearfulest man that I have ever
known, and, at first, I thought that the arch fiend had appeared before
me. The wood was very deep here, and there were no wayfarers but we two.
It was quite still; but now and then we heard the rumble of wagons, and
the crack of teamster's whips. The man in question wore dead black
beard, and his eyebrows were of the same intense, lustreless hue. So
were his eyes and his hair; but the latter formed a circle or cowl
around his head. He had a pale skin, his fingers, were long and bony,
and he rode dexterously in and out, among the tree boles, with his hat
in his hand. His horse was as black as himself, and, together, they made
a half-brigandish, half-satanic appearance.

I reined in sharply, when I saw this person, and he looked at me like
the evil-eye, through his great owlish orbs.

"Good day," he said, in profound basso, as low I think as "double G,"
and when he opened his mouth, I saw that his teeth were very white.

I saluted him gravely, and, not without a shudder, rode beside him. He
proved to be a sort of Missionary, from the Evangelical religious
denominations of the North, to inquire into the spiritual condition of
the soldiers. Camps were full of such people, but I had not found any
man who appeared to be less qualified for his vocation; to have such a
figure at one's deathbed, would be like a foretaste of the great fiend.
He had a fashion of working his scalp half way down to his eyes, as he
spoke, and when he smiled,--though he never laughed aloud,--his
eyelashes did not contract, as with most people, but rather expanded,
till his eyeballs projected from his head. On such occasions, his white
teeth were revealed like a row of fangs, and his leprous skin grew yet
paler.

"The army has not even the form of godliness," said this man. In the
course of his remarks, he had discovered that I was a correspondent, and
at once turned the conversation into a politico-religious