d, but he subdued himself to the service of his
purpose.

"The man's identity is unknown to me," he said, calmly enough.

"Pardon me," said the Governor, with even less of visible contrition
than commonly underlies those words. After a moment's reflection he
added: "I shall send you to-morrow a captain's commission in the Tenth
Infantry, now at Nashville, Tennessee. Good night."

"Good night, sir. I thank you."

Left alone, the Governor remained for a time motionless, leaning against
his desk. Presently he shrugged his shoulders as if throwing off a
burden. "This is a bad business," he said.

Seating himself at a reading-table before the fire, he took up the book
nearest his hand, absently opening it. His eyes fell upon this sentence:

"When God made it necessary for an unfaithful wife to lie about her
husband in justification of her own sins He had the tenderness to endow
men with the folly to believe her."

He looked at the title of the book; it was, _His Excellency the Fool_.

He flung the volume into the fire.

II

HOW TO SAY WHAT IS WORTH HEARING

The enemy, defeated in two days of battle at Pittsburg Landing, had
sullenly retired to Corinth, whence he had come. For manifest
incompetence Grant, whose beaten army had been saved from destruction
and capture by Buell's soldierly activity and skill, had been relieved
of his command, which nevertheless had not been given to Buell, but to
Halleck, a man of unproved powers, a theorist, sluggish, irresolute.
Foot by foot his troops, always deployed in line-of-battle to resist the
enemy's bickering skirmishers, always entrenching against the columns
that never came, advanced across the thirty miles of forest and swamp
toward an antagonist prepared to vanish at contact, like a ghost at
cock-crow. It was a campaign of "excursions and alarums," of
reconnoissances and counter-marches, of cross-purposes and countermanded
orders. For weeks the solemn farce held attention, luring distinguished
civilians from fields of political ambition to see what they safely
could of the horrors of war. Among these was our friend the Governor. At
the headquarters of the army and in the camps of the troops from his
State he was a familiar figure, attended by the several members of his
personal staff, showily horsed, faultlessly betailored and bravely
silk-hatted. Things of charm they were, rich in suggestions of peaceful
lands beyond a sea of strife. The bedraggled soldier looked up