ady to
depart.

On the floor, beside the chest of drawers, stood a small hair trunk. A
neighbour with a road wagon had offered to take it, and Allan, too, down
the mountain at three o'clock. In the spring of 1861, one out of every
two Confederate privates had a trunk. One must preserve the decencies of
life; one must make a good appearance in the field! Allan's was small
and modest enough, God knows! but such as it was it had not occurred to
him to doubt the propriety of taking it. It stood there neatly packed,
the shirts that Sairy had been ironing laid atop. The young man,
kneeling beside it, placed in this or that corner the last few articles
of his outfit. All was simple, clean, and new--only the books that he
was taking with him were old. They were his Bible, his Shakespeare, a
volume of Plutarch's Lives, and a Latin book or two beside. In a place
to themselves were other treasures, a daguerreotype of his mother, a
capacious huswife that Sairy had made and stocked for him, the little
box of paper "to write home on" that had been Tom's present, various
trifles that the three had agreed might come in handy. Among these he
now placed Christianna's gift. It was soft and full and bright--he had
the same pleasure in handling it that he would have felt in touching a
damask rose. He shut it in and rose from his knees.

He had on his uniform. They had been slow in coming--the uniforms--from
Richmond. It was only Cleave's patient insistence that had procured them
at last. Some of the companies were not uniformed at all. So enormous
was the press of business upon the authorities, so limited was the power
of an almost purely agricultural, non-manufacturing world suddenly to
clothe alike these thousands of volunteers, suddenly to arm them with
something better than a fowling-piece or a Revolutionary flintlock, that
the wonder is, not that they did so badly, but that they did so well.
Pending the arrival of the uniforms the men had drilled in strange
array. With an attempt at similarity and a picturesque taste of their
own, most of them wore linsey shirts and big black hats, tucked up on
one side with a rosette of green ribbon. One man donned his
grandfather's Continental blue and buff--on the breast was a dark stain,
won at King's Mountain. Others drilled, and were now ready to march, as
they came from the plough, the mill, or the forge. But Cleave's company,
by virtue of Cleave himself, was fairly equipped. The uniforms had c