ll that was best in himself, became gradually exhausted.
He found himself telling stories as many as three times to the same man,
and he began to steal from the poets and musicians that he knew in order
to keep abreast of his own original powers of production. He even went
so far as to draw inspiration from men of uneven heights stood in line:
he would hum the intervals as scored by their heads on an imaginary
staff and fashion his tune accordingly, but this tended to a somewhat
compressed range and was not always happy in its results. His efforts,
however, were appreciated, and the emaciated young Irishman became a
most exceptional prophet, and received honor in his own land.

For the rest, being a staff-officer, he was kept busy and rode hundreds
of extra miles through the rain. It was a large army, as inexperienced
as it was large, and it stood in great need of being kept in contact
with itself. If you lived at one end of it and wanted to know what was
going on at the other end, you had to travel about as far as from New
York to New Haven. The army proper, marching by fours, stretched away
through the wet lands for forty miles. A fly-bitten tail of ambulances
and wagons, with six miserable horses or six perfectly happy mules
attached to each, added another twenty miles. At the not always attained
rate of fifteen miles a day the army could pass a given point in four
days. To the gods in Olympus it would have appeared to have all the
characteristic color and shape of an angleworm, without, however,
enjoying that reptile's excellent good health. If the armies of
Washington, Cornwallis, Clive, Pizarro, Cortes, and Christian de Wet had
been added to it, they would have passed unnoticed in the crowd. And the
recurring fear of the general in command of this army was that the army
he sought would prove to be twice as big. So speculation was active
between the York and James rivers.

In the minds of the soldiers a thousand years passed, and then there was
a little fight, and they learned that they were soldiers. And so did
the other army. Another thousand years passed, and it seemed tactful to
change bases. Accordingly, that which had been arduously established on
a muddy river called the Chickahominy (and it was very far from either
of those two good things) was forsaken, and the host began to be moved
toward the James. This move would have been more smoothly accomplished
if the enemy had not interfered. They, however, insis