in the south was our heartbroken New Orleans. We had paused to
recuperate our animals, and there was a rumor that we were to get new
clothing. Anyhow we had rags with honor, and a right to make as much
noise as we chose.

It was being made. The air was in anguish with the din of tree-felling
and log-chopping, of stamping, neighing, braying, whooping, guffawing,
and singing--all the daybreak charivari beloved of a camp of
Confederate "critter companies." In the midst of it a chum and I sat
close together on a log near the mess fire, and as the other boys of the
mess lifted their heads from their saddle-tree pillows, from two of them
at once came a slow, disdainful acceptance of the final lot of the
wicked, made unsolicited on discovering that this chum and I had sat
there talking together all night. I had the day before been wheedled
into letting myself be detailed to be a quartermaster's clerk, and this
comrade and I were never to snuggle under the one blanket again. The
thought forbade slumber.

"If I go to sleep," I said,--"you know how I dream. I shall have one of
those dreams of mine to carry around in my memory for a year, like a
bullet in my back." So there the dear fellow had sat all night to give
me my hourly powders of reassurance that I could be a quartermaster's
clerk without shame.

"Certainly you can afford to fill a position which the leader of Ferry's
scouts has filled just before you."

But my unsoldierly motive for going to headquarters kept my misgivings
alive. I was hungry for the gentilities of camp; to be where Shakespeare
was part of the baggage, where Pope was quoted, where Coleridge and