intimate that Thurston is
a coward--and in his absence?"

"If he w--ere a cow--wow-ard h--e w--wouldn't t-try to m-m-master it;
and if he w--ere p-present I w--wouldn't d-d-dare to d-d-discuss it,"
was the mollifying reply.

This intrepid man, George Thurston, died an ignoble death. The brigade
was in camp, with headquarters in a grove of immense trees. To an upper
branch of one of these a venturesome climber had attached the two ends
of a long rope and made a swing with a length of not less than one
hundred feet. Plunging downward from a height of fifty feet, along the
arc of a circle with such a radius, soaring to an equal altitude,
pausing for one breathless instant, then sweeping dizzily backward--no
one who has not tried it can conceive the terrors of such sport to the
novice. Thurston came out of his tent one day and asked for instruction
in the mystery of propelling the swing--the art of rising and sitting,
which every boy has mastered. In a few moments he had acquired the trick
and was swinging higher than the most experienced of us had dared. We
shuddered to look at his fearful flights.

"St-t-top him," said the quartermaster, snailing lazily along from the
mess-tent, where he had been lunching; "h--e d-doesn't know that if h--e
g-g-goes c-clear over h--e'll w--ind up the sw--ing."

With such energy was that strong man cannonading himself through the air
that at each extremity of his increasing arc his body, standing in the
swing, was almost horizontal. Should he once pass above the level of the
rope's attachment he would be lost; the rope would slacken and he would
fall vertically to a point as far below as he had gone above, and then
the sudden tension of the rope would wrest it from his hands. All saw
the peril--all cried out to him to desist, and gesticulated at him as,
indistinct and with a noise like the rush of a cannon shot in flight, he
swept past us through the lower reaches of his hideous oscillation. A
woman standing at a little distance away fainted and fell unobserved.
Men from the camp of a regiment near by ran in crowds to see, all
shouting. Suddenly, as Thurston was on his upward curve, the shouts all
ceased.

Thurston and the swing had parted--that is all that can be known; both
hands at once had released the rope. The impetus of the light swing
exhausted, it was falling back; the man's momentum was carrying him,
almost erect, upward and forward, no longer in his arc, but with an
outward