I run up and get my baccy."

Presently down came the young fellow again, meerschaum in hand, the
moonlight glinting on his slender figure, so trim and jaunty in the
battery dress. Kinsey looked him over with a smile of soldierly
approval and a whimsical comment on the contrast between the appearance
of this young artillery sprig and that of his own stout personality,
clad as he was in a bulging blue flannel sack-coat, only distinguishable
in cut and style from civilian garb by its having brass buttons and a
pair of tarnished old shoulder-straps. Ferry was a swell. His shell
jacket fitted like wax. The Russian shoulder-knots of twisted gold were
of the handsomest make. The riding-breeches, top-boots, and spurs were
such that even Waring could not criticise. His sabre gleamed in the
moonbeams, and Kinsey's old leather-covered sword looked dingy by
contrast. His belt fitted trim and taut, and was polished as his
boot-tops; Kinsey's sank down over the left hip, and was worn brown. The
sash Ferry sported as battery officer of the day was draped, West Point
fashion, over the shoulder and around the waist, and accurately knotted
and looped; Kinsey's old war-worn crimson net was slung
higgledy-piggledy over his broad chest.

"What swells you fellows are, Ferry!" he said, laughingly, as the
youngster came dancing down. "Even old Doyle gets out here in his
scarlet plume occasionally and puts us doughboys to shame. What's the
use in trying to make such a rig as ours look soldierly? If it were not
for the brass buttons our coats would make us look like parsons and our
hats like monkeys. As for this undress, all that can be said in its
favor is, you can't spoil it even by sleeping out on the levee in it, as
I am sometimes tempted to do. Let's go out there now."

It was perhaps quarter of two when they took their seats on the wooden
bench under the trees, and, lighting their pipes, gazed out over the
broad sweeping flood of the Mississippi, gleaming like a silvered shield
in the moonlight. Far across at the opposite shore the low line of
orange-groves and plantation houses and quarters was merged in one long
streak of gloom, relieved only at intervals by twinkling light. Farther
up-stream, like dozing sea-dogs, the fleet of monitors lay moored along
the bank, with the masts and roofs of Algiers dimly outlined against the
crescent sweep of lights that marked the levee of the great Southern
metropolis, still prostrate from the savag