nvestigate
the affair. I was nervous and excited, fearing while I was prosecuting the
investigation one or both of them might return and discover what I was
doing. I felt like a culprit and blushed like a school girl at the sound
of approaching footsteps. A sense of guiltiness took possession of me, and
I felt as though I was committing some terrible crime. I know I should
have fled most ignominiously had either of them come back, while I was
thus employed, for such a thing had not been thought of as possible to us,
and it would forever disgrace me to be the one who should bring such a
filthy plague into our hitherto tidy and carefully-kept tent. It did not
take long to solve the mystery, and to say that I was thoroughly disgusted
and overcome to find my worst fears realized, in discovering two good,
fat, healthy-looking graybacks under the seams of my drawers, would but
faintly express the sensations I experienced.

[Illustration: SKIRMISHING AT MACON, GA.]

After assuring myself that there were no more I hastily resumed my
apparel, and tried to look as though nothing had occurred when my comrades
again returned. But that guilty feeling would not forsake me, and I was
really ashamed to look them in the face, and though I tried hard to appear
natural, I thought they looked at me suspiciously.

"Conscience makes cowards of us all."

I know I was gloomy and dejected all the balance of the evening. This was
noticed by my tent mates, but was attributed to a far different cause.
They thought I was homesick, while the discovery had only made me sick at
the stomach. It was not many weeks, however, before I could set down with
my pipe in my mouth, in company with half a dozen others, and go through
the same operations with the nonchalance that the same number of old
ladies would gossip over their KNITTING WORK.

Before our prison life was over, it was no uncommon occurrence to receive
a morning call from some old comrade, who would do as these old ladies
used to do when they went a visiting, bring his k--nitting work along, and
in passing one another's quarters such dialogues as this would frequently
be heard: "Hello, Johnny! on the skirmish line, what luck?" "Oh I ain't
doing much this morning, kind er drivin' in the pickets, git a stray shot
now and then, but I keep annoying them so they don't get a chance to
form."

It is astonishing how quickly we became accustomed to things of this sort.
The Brigadier General, wh