oping against certainty. My mind was
filling with fancies concerning them--concerning her. How I ever began
to think of such, a possibility I could not know.

My fancies embraced everything. My family might be rich and powerful
and intelligent; it, might be humble, even being the strong likelihood
was that it was neither, but was of medium worth.

My fancy--it began in a dream--pictured the face of a woman, young and
sweet weeping for me. I wept for her and for myself. Who was she? Was
she all fancy?

Since I had been in Company H, I had never spoken to a woman except the
nurses in the hospitals. I had seen many women in Richmond and
elsewhere. No face of my recollection fitted with the face of my dream.
None seemed it's equal in sweetness and dignity.

I had written love letters at the dictation of one or two of the men. I
had read love stories. I felt as the men had seemed to feel, and as the
lovers in the stories had seemed to feel.

No one knew, since the Captain's death, even the short history of myself
that I knew. I grew morose. The men avoided me, all but one--Jerry
Butler. Somehow I found myself messing with him. He was a great forager,
and kept us both in food. The rations were almost regular, but the fat
bacon and mouldy meal turned my stomach. The other men were in good
health, and ate heartily of the coarse food given them. Butler had bacon
and meal to sell.

The men wondered what was the matter with me. Their wonder did not
exceed my own. Butler invited my confidence, but I could not decide to
say a word; one word would have made it necessary to tell him all I
knew. He would have thought me insane.

I did my duty mechanically, serving on camp guard and on picket
regularly, but feeling interest in nothing beyond my own inner self.

At times the battle of Manassas and the spot in the forest would recur
to me with great vividness and power. Where and what was my original
regiment? I pondered over the puzzle, and I had much time in which to
ponder. I remembered that Dr. Frost had told me that if ever I got the
smallest clew to my past, I must determine then and there to never
let it go.

Sometimes instants of seeming recollection would flash by and be gone
before I could define them. They left no result but doubt--sometimes
fear. Doubts of the righteousness of war beset me--not of this war, but
war. I had a vague notion that in some hazy past I had listened to
strong reasons against war. Were they f