mp should be guarded against surprise by the posting
of pickets. I was ordered to place a picket at the forks of the road in
Hyde's prairie. Night shut down black and threatening. I told Sergeant
Bowers to go out to that place and stay till midnight; and, just as I
was expecting, he said he wouldn't do it. I tried to get others to go,
but all refused. Some excused themselves on account of the weather;
but the rest were frank enough to say they wouldn't go in any kind
of weather. This kind of thing sounds odd now, and impossible, but it
seemed a perfectly natural thing to do. There were scores of little
camps scattered over Missouri where the same thing was happening. These
camps were composed of young men who had been born and reared to a
sturdy independence, and who did not know what it meant to be ordered
around by Tom, Dick, and Harry, whom they had known familiarly all
their lives, in the village or on the farm. It is quite within the
probabilities that this same thing was happening all over the South.
James Redpath recognised the justice of this assumption, and furnished
the following instance in support of it. During a short stay in East
Tennessee he was in a citizen colonel's tent one day, talking, when
a big private appeared at the door, and without salute or other
circumlocution said to the colonel:

'Say, Jim, I'm a-goin' home for a few days.'

'What for?'

'Well, I hain't b'en there for a right smart while, and I'd like to see
how things is comin' on.'

'How long are you going to be gone?'

''Bout two weeks.'

'Well don't be gone longer than that; and get back sooner if you can.'

That was all, and the citizen officer resumed his conversation where the
private had broken it off. This was in the first months of the war, of
course. The camps in our part of Missouri were under Brigadier-General
Thomas H. Harris. He was a townsman of ours, a first-rate fellow,
and well liked; but we had all familiarly known him as the sole and
modest-salaried operator in our telegraph office, where he had to send
about one dispatch a week in ordinary times, and two when there was a
rush of business; consequently, when he appeared in our midst one day,
on the wing, and delivered a military command of some sort, in a large
military fashion, nobody was surprised at the response which he got from
the assembled soldiery:

'Oh, now, what'll you take to don't, Tom Harris!'

It was quite the natural thing. One might justly ima