His head bent down, he did not see a man who stood looking at him over
the wicket. Captain Dorr. A puny little man, with thin yellow hair, and
womanish face: but not the less the hero of his men,--they having found
out, somehow, that muscle was not the solidest thing to travel on in
war-times. Our regiments of "roughs" were not altogether crowned with
laurel at Manassas! So the men built more on the old Greatheart soul
in the man's blue eyes: one of those souls born and bred pure, sent to
teach, that can find breath only in the free North. His hearty "Hillo!"
startled Lamar.

"How are you, old fellow?" he said, unlocking the gate and coming in.

Lamar threw off his wretched thoughts, glad to do it. What need to
borrow trouble? He liked a laugh,--had a lazy, jolly humor of his own.
Dorr had finished drill, and come up, as he did every day, to freshen
himself with an hour's talk to this warm, blundering fellow. In this
dismal war-work, (though his whole soul was in that, too,) it was
like putting your hands to a big blaze. Dorr had no near relations;
Lamar--they had played marbles together--stood to him where a younger
brother might have stood. Yet, as they talked, he could not help his
keen eye seeing him just as he was.

Poor John! he thought: the same uncouth-looking effort of humanity that
he had been at Yale. No wonder the Northern boys jeered him, with his
sloth-ways, his mouthed English, torpid eyes, and brain shut up in that
worst of mud-moulds,--belief in caste. Even now, going up and down the
tan-bark, his step was dead, sodden, like that of a man in whose life
God had not yet wakened the full live soul. It was wakening, though,
Dorr thought. Some pain or passion was bringing the man in him out of