-it would have been natural had they
yielded to the combined strain on mind and matter. At midwinter I had
occasion to visit Evansport and Acquia creek. It had been bitter cold;
a sudden thaw had made the air raw and keen, while my horse went to his
girths at every plunge. More than once I had to dismount in mire
girth-deep to help him on. Suddenly I came upon a Maryland camp--supports
to a battery. Some of the soldiers I had known as the gayest and most
petted of ball-room and club; and now they were cutting wood and frying
bacon, as if they had never done anything else. Hands that never before
felt an ax-helve plied it now as if for life; eyes that were accustomed
to look softly into

"The sweetest eyes that ever were,"

in the pauses of a waltz, now peered curiously in the reeking stew-pan.
Many of their names recalled the history of days long gone, for their
father's fathers had moved in stately pageant down its brightest pages;
and blood flowed in their veins blue as the proudest of earth's
nobility. They had left affluence, luxury, the caresses of home--and,
harder than all, the habits of society--for what?

Was it thoughtlessly to rush foremost in the delirious shock of
battle; to carelessly stand unflinchingly where the wing of death
flapped darkest over the glare of the fight; to stand knee-deep in
Virginia mud, with high boots and rough shirts, and fry moldy bacon
over fires of wet brush? Or was it that the old current in their
veins bounded hotly when they believed a wrong was doing; that all
else--home--luxury--love--life!--faded away before the might of
principle?

It was an odd meeting with the crowd that collected about me and
anxiously asked the news from Richmond, from abroad, but above all,
from home. Bronzed and bearded, their huge boots caked with Potomac mud
and rough shirts open at their sunburnt throats; chapped hands and
faces grimy with smoke and work, there was yet something about these
men that spoke them, at a glance, raised above the herd. John Leech,
who so reveled in the "Camps at Cobham," would here have found a
companion-piece for the opposition of the picture.

"Hello, old boy! any news from home?" yelled a whiskered sergeant,
jumping from a log where he was mending a rent in his pants, and giving
me a hand the color of his favorite tan gloves in days lang
syne--"Pretty tight work up here, you see, but we manage to keep
comfortable!"--God save the mark!

"What do you think B