s watch there, hour by hour, with such courage as the
sense of the advance gives boy or man. He had not neglected to take the
indispensable shovel as he came. In going over the causeway he had
slipped off the snow-shoes and hung them on his back. Then there was
heavy wading as he turned into the Pitman cut, knee deep, middle deep,
and he laid his snow-shoes on the snow and set the red lantern on them,
as he reconnoitred. Middle deep, neck deep, and he fell forward on his
face into the yielding mass. "This will not do, I must not fall like
that often," said Silas to himself, as he gained his balance and threw
himself backward against the mass. Slowly he turned round, worked back
to the lantern, worked out to the causeway, and fastened on the shoes
again. With their safer help he easily skimmed up to Pitman's bridge,
which he had determined on for his station. He knew that thence his
lantern could be seen for a mile, and that yet there the train might
safely be stopped, so near was the open causeway which he had just
traversed. He had no fear of an up-train behind him.

So Silas walked back and forth, and sang, and spouted "pieces," and
mused on the future of his life, and spouted "pieces" again, and sang in
the loneliness. How the time passed, he did not know. No sound of clock,
no baying of dog, no plash of waterfall, broke that utter stillness. The
wind, thank God, had at last died away; and Silas paced his beat in a
long oval he made for himself, under and beyond the bridge, with no
sound but his own voice when he chose to raise it. He expected, as they
all did, that every moment the whistle of the train, as it swept into
sight a mile or more away, would break the silence; so he paced, and
shouted, and sang.

"This is a man's duty," he said to himself: "they would not let me go
with the fifth regiment,--not as a drummer boy; but this is duty such as
no drummer boy of them all is doing. Company, march!" and he "stepped
forward smartly" with his left foot. "Really I am placed on guard here
quite as much as if I were on picket in Virginia." "Who goes there?"
"Advance, friend, and give the countersign." Not that any one did go
there, or could go there; but the boy's fancy was ready, and so he
amused himself during the first hours. Then he began to wonder whether
they were hours, as they seemed, or whether this was all a wretched
illusion,--that the time passed slowly to him because he was nothing but
a boy, and did not k