ly smoking our brier-wood pipes, thinking our thoughts,
and listening to the rain pattering against the canvas. That, and the
occasional whine of a hungry cur, foraging on the outskirts of the camp
for a stray bone, alone broke the silence, save when a vicious drop of
rain detached itself meditatively from the ridge-pole of the tent, and
fell upon the wick of our tallow candle, making it "cuss," as Ned Strong
described it. The candle was in the midst of one of its most profane
fits when Blakely, knocking the ashes from his pipe and addressing no
one in particular, but giving breath, unconsciously as it were, to
the result of his cogitations, observed that "it was considerable of a
fizzle."

"The 'on to Richmond' business?"

"Yes."

"I wonder what they 'll do about it over yonder," said Curtis, pointing
over his right shoulder. By "over yonder" he meant the North in general
and Massachusetts especially. Curtis was a Boston boy, and his sense of
locality was so strong that, during all his wanderings in Virginia, I
do not believe there was a moment, day or night, when he could not have
made a bee-line for Faneuil Hall.

"Do about it?" cried Strong. "They 'll make about two hundred thousand
blue flannel trousers and send them along, each pair with a man in
it--all the short men in the long trousers, and all the tall men in the
short ones," he added, ruefully contemplating his own leg-gear, which
scarcely reached to his ankles.

"That's so," said Blakely. "Just now, when I was tackling the commissary
for an extra candle, I saw a crowd of new fellows drawing blankets."

"I say there, drop that!" cried Strong. "All right, sir, didn't know
it was you," he added hastily, seeing it was Lieutenant Haines who had
thrown back the flap of the tent, and let in a gust of wind and
rain that threatened the most serious bronchial consequences to our
discontented tallow dip.

"You 're to bunk in here," said the lieutenant, speaking to some one
outside. The some one stepped in, and Haines vanished in the darkness.

When Strong had succeeded in restoring the candle to consciousness, the
light fell upon a tall, shy-looking man of about thirty-five, with
long, hay-colored beard and mustache, upon which the rain-drops stood in
clusters, like the night-dew on patches of cobweb in a meadow. It was
an honest face, with unworldly sort of blue eyes, that looked out from
under the broad visor of the infantry cap. With a deferential glance
t