as General Banks shall have answered General Kelly's
letter."

"You have an occasional fight over there?"

"Yes, up and down the line. Ashby's command is rather active."

"By George! I wish I were returning with you! When you've reported I'll
look after you if you'll allow me. Pleasant enough mess.--Major Hertz,
whom I knew in Prussia, Captain Wingate of your old army and one or two
others."

"I'm exceedingly obliged," said McNeill, "but I have ridden hard of
late, and slept little, and I should prove dull company. Moreover
there's a good priest in Frederick who is a friend of a friend of mine.
I have a message for him, and if General Banks permits, I shall sleep
soundly and quietly at his house to-night."

"Very good," said Marchmont. "You'll get a better night there, though
I'm sorry not to have you with us.--There are the lights of Frederick,
and here's the picket. You have your pass from Williamsport?"

McNeill gave it to a blue soldier, who called a corporal, who read it by
a swinging lantern. "Very good. Pass, Lieutenant McNeill."

The two rode on. To left and right were lighted streets of tents, varied
here and there by substantial cabins. Commissary quarters appeared,
sutlers' shops, booths, places of entertainment, guardhouses, a chapel.
Soldiers were everywhere, dimly seen within the tents where the door
flap was fastened back, plain to view about the camp-fires in open
places, clustering like bees in the small squares from which ran the
camp streets, thronging the trodden places before the sutlers,
everywhere apparent in the foreground and divined in the distance. From
somewhere came the strains of "Yankee Doodle." A gust of wind blew out
the folds of the stars and stripes, fastened above some regimental
headquarters. The city of tents and of frame structures hasty and crude,
of fires in open places, of sutlers' shops and cantines, and booths of
strolling players, of chapels and hospitals, of fluttering flags and
wandering music, of restless blue soldiers, oscillating like motes in
some searchlight of the giants, persisted for a long distance. At last
it died away; there came a quiet field or two, then the old Maryland
town of Frederick.

CHAPTER XI

"AS JOSEPH WAS A-WALKING"

At eleven that night by the Frederick clocks an orderly found an
Englishman, a Prussian, a New Yorker, and a man from somewhere west of
the Mississippi playing poker. "General Banks would like to speak to
Captain Ma