sleepy, open countryside, with its gentle hills and fertile valleys,
broad fields and neat stone walls, its winding roads and orchards, and
every pretty farmhouse standing as though no war were in the land, all
seems so peaceful, so secure, that the faces of the people sicken me.
And ever I am asking myself, where lies this other hell on earth,
which only faces such as these could have looked upon?"

"It is sad," I said, under my breath. "Even when a lass smiles on us
it seems to start the tears in my throat."

"Sad! Yes, sir, it is. I supposed we had seen sufficient of human
degradation in the North not to come here to find the same cringing
expression stamped on every countenance. I'm sick of it, I tell you.
Why, the British are doing worse than merely filling their prisons
with us and scalping us with their savages! They are slowly but surely
marking our people, body and face and mind, with the cursed imprint of
slavery. They're stamping a nation's very features with the hopeless
lineaments of serfdom. It is the ineradicable scars of former slavery
that make the New Englander whine through his nose. We of the fighting
line bear no such marks, but the peaceful people are beginning to--
they who can do nothing except endure and suffer."

"It is not so everywhere," I said, "not yet, anyway."

"It is so in the North. And we have found it so since we entered the
'Neutral Ground.' Like our own people on the frontier, these
Westchester folk fear everybody. You yourself know how we have found
them. To every question they try to give an answer that may please; or
if they despair of pleasing they answer cautiously, in order not to
anger. The only sentiment left alive in them seems to be fear; all