ear his decorations beneath his uniform than on it?

Yet among them were figures which arrested our attention and sympathy.
Delicate boys, with more spirit than strength, flushed with fever or pale
with exhaustion or haggard with suffering, dragged their weary limbs
along as if each step would exhaust their slender store of strength. At
the roadside sat or lay others, quite spent with their journey. Here and
there was a house at which the wayfarers would stop, in the hope, I fear
often vain, of getting refreshment; and in one place was a clear, cool
spring, where the little bands of the long procession halted for a few
moments, as the trains that traverse the desert rest by its fountains.
My companions had brought a few peaches along with them, which the
Philanthropist bestowed upon the tired and thirsty soldiers with a
satisfaction which we all shared. I had with me a small flask of strong
waters, to be used as a medicine in case of inward grief. From this,
also, he dispensed relief, without hesitation, to a poor fellow who
looked as if he needed it. I rather admired the simplicity with which he
applied my limited means of solace to the first-comer who wanted it more
than I; a genuine benevolent impulse does not stand on ceremony, and had
I perished of colic for want of a stimulus that night, I should not have
reproached my friend the Philanthropist, any more than I grudged my other
ardent friend the two dollars and more which it cost me to send the
charitable message he left in my hands.

It was a lovely country through which we were riding. The hillsides
rolled away into the distance, slanting up fair and broad to the sun, as
one sees them in the open parts of the Berkshire Valley, at Lanesborough,
for instance, or in the many-hued mountain chalice at the bottom of which
the Shaker houses of Lebanon have shaped themselves like a sediment of
cubical crystals. The wheat was all garnered, and the land ploughed for
a new crop. There was Indian corn standing, but I saw no pumpkins
warming their yellow carapaces in the sunshine like so many turtles; only
in a single instance did I notice some wretched little miniature
specimens in form and hue not unlike those colossal oranges of our
cornfields. The rail fences were somewhat disturbed, and the cinders of
extinguished fires showed the use to which they had been applied. The
houses along the road were not for the most part neatly kept; the garden
fences were poorly