ncestors used to put theirs into the scale, when they were buying furs
of the Indians by weight,--so much for the weight of a hand, so much for
the weight of a foot. It deranged the balance of our intercourse; there
was no use in throwing a fly where a paving-stone had just splashed into
the water, and I nodded a good-by to the boy-fighter, thinking how much
pleasanter it was for my friend the Captain to address him with
unanswerable arguments and crushing statements in his own tent than it
would be to meet him upon some remote picket station and offer his fair
proportions to the quick eye of a youngster who would draw a bead on him
before he had time to say dunder and blixum.

We drove back to the town. No message. After dinner still no message.
Dr. Cuyler, Chief Army Hospital Inspector, is in town, they say. Let us
hunt him up,--perhaps he can help us.

We found him at the Jones House. A gentleman of large proportions, but
of lively temperament, his frame knit in the North, I think, but ripened
in Georgia, incisive, prompt but good-humored, wearing his broad-brimmed,
steeple-crowned felt hat with the least possible tilt on one side,--a
sure sign of exuberant vitality in a mature and dignified person like
him, business-like in his ways, and not to be interrupted while occupied
with another, but giving himself up heartily to the claimant who held him
for the time. He was so genial, so cordial, so encouraging, that it
seemed as if the clouds, which had been thick all the morning, broke away
as we came into his presence, and the sunshine of his large nature filled
the air all around us. He took the matter in hand at once, as if it were
his own private affair. In ten minutes he had a second telegraphic
message on its way to Mrs. K at Hagerstown, sent through the Government
channel from the State Capitol,--one so direct and urgent that I should
be sure of an answer to it, whatever became of the one I had sent in the
morning.

While this was going on, we hired a dilapidated barouche, driven by an
odd young native, neither boy nor man, "as a codling when 't is almost an
apple," who said wery for very, simple and sincere, who smiled faintly
at our pleasantries, always with a certain reserve of suspicion, and a
gleam of the shrewdness that all men get who live in the atmosphere of
horses. He drove us round by the Capitol grounds, white with tents,
which were disgraced in my eyes by unsoldierly scrawls in huge letters