" asked another.

"Your coat puckers under the arms and wrinkles in the back," said
another.

"He felt so big they had to hoop him to keep him from bursting,"
remarked one, who remembered how pompous Philip had been.

After being marched through the camp, he was set to work with a shovel,
cleaning up the grounds. It was a sorry day to Philip. He wished he had
never been born. He was despised alike by officers and soldiers. The
officers made him do their dirty work, while the soldiers, knowing that
he had not courage enough to resent an insult, made him the general
scavenger of the camp. This treatment was so hard to bear that Philip
thought of deserting; but he knew that if he was caught he would be
shot, and did not dare to make the attempt. The slaves in the camp
looked down upon him, and spoke of him as the "meanest sort of Yankee
white trash." The soldiers turned him out of their tents. "We won't have
a Yankee thief and coward in our mess," said they, and he was obliged to
sleep under the trees, or wherever he could find shelter. He became
dirty and ragged. His clothes dropped from him piece by piece, till he
had nothing left but rags. He had little to eat. He had no friends. When
he was sick, no one cared for him. Those were bitter days; but instead
of being made better at heart by his punishment, he cursed and swore,
and wished only that he could get whiskey to drink.

Winter set in. There came a cold, stormy night. Philip wandered about
the camp to keep himself warm. He was weak and faint, and at last,
tired, exhausted, and his teeth chattering with ague, crawled into a
wagon, drew his old tattered blanket over his head, and after shivering
awhile went to sleep. The teamsters found him there in the morning,
stiff and cold. He had died during the night, with no friend near him, a
vagabond, an outcast, despised by everybody.

The officer who had charge of the camp, when he heard that Philip was
dead, called up a couple of soldiers who were in the guard-house for
getting drunk, and said to them, "You were drunk yesterday, and for a
punishment I sentence you to bury the camp-scullion who froze to death
last night."

The teamster harnessed his horses, drove outside of the camp into a
field, where the two soldiers dug a shallow grave, tumbled the body into
it, threw back the earth, trampled it down with their feet, shouldered
their shovels, and went back to camp as unconcerned as if they had
buried a dog.