in strange surroundings.

A man of austere mold was the new major,--one of the old Covenanter
type, who would march to battle shouting hymn tunes, and to Christmas
and Thanksgiving chanting doleful lays. He hailed, indeed, from old
Puritan stock; had been a pillar in the village church in days before
the great war, and emulated Stonewall Jackson in his piety, if he did
not in martial prowess. Backed by local, and by no means secular,
influences he had risen in the course of the four years' war from a
junior lieutenancy to the grade of second in command of his far eastern
regiment; had rendered faithful services in command of convalescent
camps and the like, but developed none of that vain ambition which
prompts the seeking of "the bubble reputation" at the cannon's mouth.
All he ever knew of Southern men in ante-bellum days was what he heard
from the lips of inspired orators or read from the pens of very earnest
anti-slavery editors. Through lack of opportunity he had met no
Southerner before the war, and carried his stanch, Calvinistic
prejudices to such extent that he seemed to shrink from closer contact
even then. The war was holy. The hand of the Lord would surely smite the
slave-holding arch rebel, which was perhaps why the Covenanter thought
it work of supererogation to raise his own. He finished as he began the
war, in the unalterable conviction that the Southern President, his
cabinet and all his leading officers should be hung, and their lands
confiscated to the state--or its representatives. He had been given a
commission in the army when such things were not hard to get--at the
reorganization in '66, had been stationed in a Ku Klux district all one
winter and in a sanitarium most of the year that followed. He thought
the nation on the highroad to hell when it failed to impeach the
President of high crimes and misdemeanors, and sent Hancock to harmonize
matters in Louisiana. He was sure of it when the son of a Southerner,
who had openly flouted him, was sent to West Point. He retained these
radical views even unto the twentieth anniversary of the great
surrender; and, while devoutly praying for forgiveness of his own sins,
could never seem to forgive those whose lot had been cast with the
South. He was utterly nonplussed when told that the young officer,
languishing in hospital on his arrival, was the son of a distinguished
major-general of the Confederate Army, and he planned for the father a
most frigid gre