ings of the post of duty to which she had been assigned. She
found herself in a little city of rough plank barracks, arranged in
geometrically correct streets and angles about a great plain of a parade
ground, from which the heat radiated as from a glowing stove. A flag
drooped as if wilted from the top of a tall pole standing on the side
of the parade-ground opposite her. Languidly pacing in front of the
Colonel's tent was an Orderly, who had been selected in the morning
for his spruce neatness, but who now looked like some enormous blue
vegetable, rapidly withering under the sun's blistering rays.

Beyond were the barracks, baking and sweltering, cracking their rough,
unpainted sides into yawning fissures, and filling the smothering air
with resinous odors distilled from the fat knots in the refuse
planking of which they were built. Beyond these was the line of
camp-guards--bright gun-barrels and bayonets glistening painfully, and
those who bore them walking with as weary slowness as was consistent
with any motion whatever, along their beats.

On straw in the oven-like barracks, and under the few trees in the
camp-ground, lay the flushed and panting soldiers, waiting wearily for
that relief which the descending sun would bring.

The hospital to which Rachel had been brought differed from the rest
of the sheds in the camp by being whitewashed within and without, which
made it radiate a still more unendurable heat than its duller-lustered
companions. A powerful odor of chloride of lime and carbolic acid
shocked her sensitive nostrils with their tales of all the repulsiveness
those disinfectants were intended to destroy or hide.

Several dejected, hollow-eyed convalescents, whose uniforms hung about
their wasted bodies as they would about wooden crosses, sat on benches
in the scanty shade by one side of the building, and fanned themselves
weakly with fans clumsily fashioned from old newspapers. They looked up
as the trim, lady-like figure stepped lightly down from the ambulance,
and the long-absent luster returned briefly to their sad eyes.

"That looks like home, Jim," said one of the fever-wasted.

"That it does. Lord! she looks as fresh and sweet as the Johnny-jump-ups
down by our old spring-house. I expect she's come down here to find
somebody that belongs to her that's sick. Don't I wish it was me!"

"I wouldn't mind being a brother, or a cousin, or a sweetheart to her
myself. That'd be better luck than to be