o paternal, was he that they
made the more of their wretched woes, seeing them so deeply deplored.
The senior surgeon, moreover, was not an ardent religionist. "This is no
time for a revival, Mr. Whitmel," he would insist. "Jack, there, never
spoke the name of God in his life, except to swear by it. He is too late
for prayers, and if _I_ can't pull him through, he is a goner!"

But the chaplain was fond of quoting:

"Between the stirrup and the ground
He mercy sought and mercy found----"

and sometimes the scene was irreverently called a "love feast" when some
hard-riding, hard-swearing, hard-fighting, unthinking sinner went
joyfully out of this world from the fatherly arms of the chaplain into
the paternal embrace of an eternal and merciful Father, as the man of
God firmly believed.

He stood now, staring after the guidon borne through the rain and the
mist, flaunting red as the last leaves of autumn against the dun-tinted
dusk, that the dead might view the gallant and honored pennant and rise
again to its leading!

No one followed but the tall, thin figure of the gaunt old chaplain,
unless indeed the trooping shadows that kept him company had
mysteriously roused at the stirring summons. Lanterns were now visible,
dimly flickering in one quarter where the fighting had been furious and
the slain lay six deep on the ground. Their aspirations, their valor,
their patriotism, had all exhaled--volatile essences, these incomparable
values!--and now their bodies, weighted with death, cumbered the earth.
They must be hurried out of sight, out of remembrance soon, and the
burial parties were urged to diligence at the trenches where these
cast-off semblances were to lie undistinguished together. And still the
reflection of the burning house reddened the gloomy west, and still the
cry, "Rally on the guidon! Dovinger's Rangers!" smote the thick air.

Suddenly it was silent. The white horse that had been visible in the
flare from the flaming house, now and again flung athwart the landscape,
no longer loomed in the vista of the shadowy road. He had given way at
last, sinking down with that martial figure still in the saddle, and,
with no struggle save a mere galvanic shiver, passing away from the
scene of his faithful devoirs.

Fatigue, agitation, anguish, his agonized obsession of the possibility
of rallying the squadron, had served to prostrate the soldier's physical
powers of resistance. He could not constrain his