eyes, and throw up
your head like you was listening for it to thunder. Then while in that
attitude, act as if you didn't notice and let all your clothing fall
entirely off your shoulder. If you'll have your picture taken that way
and give me one, I'll promise you to set a heap of store by it, old
man."

Orchard looked over the edge of the rock at his reflection in the
water, and ventured, "Wouldn't I need a shave? and oughtn't I to have
a string of beads around my swan-like neck, with a few spangles on it
to glitter and sparkle? I'd have to hold my right hand over this
old gun scar in my left shoulder, so as not to mar the beauty of the
picture. Remind me of it, John, and I'll have some taken, and you
shall have one."

A few minutes later Happy Jack took his place on the rim of the rock
to make a dive, his magnificent physique of six feet and two hundred
pounds looming up like a Numidian cavalryman, when Dad observed,
"How comes it, Jack, that you are so pitted in the face and neck with
pox-marks, and there's none on your body?"

"Just because they come that way, I reckon," was the answer
vouchsafed. "You may think I'm funning, lads, but I never felt so
supremely happy in all my life as when I got well of the smallpox. I
had one hundred and ninety dollars in my pocket when I took down with
them, and only had eight left when I got up and was able to go to
work." Here, as he poised on tiptoe, with his hands gracefully arched
over his head for a dive, he was arrested in the movement by a comment
of one of the boys, to the effect that he "couldn't see anything in
that to make a man so _supremely happy_."

He turned his head halfway round at the speaker, and never losing his
poise, remarked, "Well, but you must recollect that there was five of
us taken down at the same time, and the other four died," and he made
a graceful spring, boring a hole in the water, which seethed around
him, arising a moment later throwing water like a porpoise, as though
he wouldn't exchange his position in life, humble as it was, with any
one of a thousand dead heroes.

After an hour in the water and a critical examination of all the old
gun-shot wounds of our whole squad, and the consequent verdict that
it was simply impossible to kill a man, we returned to camp and began
getting supper. There was no stomach so sensitive amongst us that it
couldn't assimilate bacon, beans, and black coffee.

When we had done justice to the supper, the twi