e the morning before."

The woman was a sutler. She listened to Ellen's explanations, incoherent
enough probably, and then, bursting into a loud laugh, called to some of
the soldiers lounging near by.

"Here's a likely tale," she said. "I half suspect this is the Rebel spy
that's been hanging round these two weeks, and kept Allan dodging you.
See to her, boys, while I weigh out this sugar."

The regiment was made up of the offals of a large city; the men, both
brutal and idle, eager for excitement; this sutler, the only woman in
camp. The evening was coming on. Ellen was alone in the half-drunken,
shouting crowd.

--Not alone. He was near who was real and actual to her always. When I
think of Christ as the All-Wise and All-Merciful in this our present
day, I like to remember Him as going step by step with this half-crazed
child in her long and solitary journey. When I hear how her danger was
warded back, how every rough face turned at last towards her with a
strange kindness, and tenderness, I see again the Hand that wrote upon
the dust of the Temple, and clearer than in the storm or battle which I
know He guides I see again the face of Him who took little children in
His arms and blessed them.

When the sutler went down to the end of the field she found Big Jake,
the bully of the regiment, holding the girl by the shoulder, her clothes
covered with mud with which the men had pelted her. She had given one or
two low cries of terror, and stood shivering weakly, her eye alone
steady, holding the man at bay, as she might a brute. She held out her
hands when she saw the woman. "I am no spy," she cried, shrilly.

"We'll soon test that," growled the camp-follower.

"Here, you Jake, unhand the girl! Yonder's Captain C---- looking this
way. If she turns out as I say, it'll be a lucky stroke of work for you
an' me."

Jake flung her back with a curse, and the woman led her to her shed. She
searched Ellen. I saw the girl, when she told it, turn ashy white with
terrible shame and anger. She was one of the womanliest women I ever
knew.

"I would have killed her then," she said gravely.

"When she could not find that I was a spy, she fastened me in an open
pen outside her shed. I tore off the clothes she had touched, they
seemed so vile to me. I was so shamed that I held my hands to my throat
so that I could die, but she came and fastened them with a cord. She
kept me there all the evening, and the men looked over the pen