an epitome of war; that all war must be
just that--the killing of strangers against whom you feel no personal
animosity; strangers whom, in other circumstances, you would help if
you found them in trouble, and who would help you if you needed it. My
campaign was spoiled. It seemed to me that I was not rightly equipped
for this awful business; that war was intended for men, and I for
a child's nurse. I resolved to retire from this avocation of sham
soldiership while I could save some remnant of my self-respect. These
morbid thoughts clung to me against reason; for at bottom I did not
believe I had touched that man. The law of probabilities decreed me
guiltless of his blood; for in all my small experience with guns I had
never hit anything I had tried to hit, and I knew I had done my best
to hit him. Yet there was no solace in the thought. Against a diseased
imagination, demonstration goes for nothing.

The rest of my war experience was of a piece with what I have already
told of it. We kept monotonously falling back upon one camp or another,
and eating up the country--I marvel now at the patience of the farmers
and their families. They ought to have shot us; on the contrary, they
were as hospitably kind and courteous to us as if we had deserved it. In
one of these camps we found Ab Grimes, an Upper Mississippi pilot,
who afterwards became famous as a dare-devil rebel spy, whose career
bristled with desperate adventures. The look and style of his comrades
suggested that they had not come into the war to play, and their
deeds made good the conjecture later. They were fine horsemen and good
revolver-shots; but their favourite arm was the lasso. Each had one at
his pommel, and could snatch a man out of the saddle with it every time,
on a full gallop, at any reasonable distance.

In another camp the chief was a fierce and profane old blacksmith of
sixty, and he had furnished his twenty recruits with gigantic home-made
bowie-knives, to be swung with the two hands, like the machetes of the
Isthmus. It was a grisly spectacle to see that earnest band practising
their murderous cuts and slashes under the eye of that remorseless old
fanatic.

The last camp which we fell back upon was in a hollow near the village
of Florida, where I was born--in Monroe County. Here we were warned, one
day, that a Union colonel was sweeping down on us with a whole regiment
at his heels. This looked decidedly serious. Our boys went apart and
consu