be handy to wear
when I wanted to stand with my back to the fire in hades. I could not
understand why the good man should joke me, on my death bed, and I
rolled over with my back to the wall, to weep, unobserved, and I felt
the blood sticking to my clothes and person, and I asked the doctor why
he did not dress my wound. He said he should have to send the wound
to the tin-shop to be dressed, and then they all laughed. This made me
indignant, and I turned over and faced the crowd, and asked them if they
had no hearts, that they could thus mock at a dying man. The doctor held
up my canteen with a hole in it, made by a stone thrown by one of my
companions, and said, "You d----d fool, you are not wounded. Somebody
busted your canteen, and the whiskey run down your leg and into your
boot, and you, like an idiot, thought it was your life blood ebbing
away. Couldn't you tell that it was whiskey by the smell?" I felt of
myself, where I thought I was wounded, and couldn't find any hole, and
then I took off my boot, and emptied the whisky out, and felt stronger,
and finally I got up, and the boys went away laughing at me, leaving the
chaplain, who was kind enough to tell me that of all the raw recruits
that had ever come to the regiment, he thought I was the biggest idiot
of the lot, to let the boys play that ancient breast-plate and canteen
joke on me. I asked him if the boys didn't all wear breast-plates, and
he said "naw!" He told me that was the only breast-plate in the whole
Department of the Gulf, and it was kept to play on recruits, and that I
must keep it until a new recruit came that was green enough to allow the
boys to do him up. So I hid the breast-plate under my bunk, and went
to bed and tried to dream out some method of getting even with my
persecutors, while the chaplain went out, after offering to hold himself
in readiness, day or night, to come and pray for me, if I was wounded in
the canteen any more.

CHAPTER IV.

I Yearn for a Furlough--I Interview the General--I am
Detailed to Carry a Rail--I Make a Horse-trade With the
Chaplain--I am Put in Charge of a Funeral.

I had now been fighting the battles of my country for two weeks, and
felt that I needed rest, and one day I became so homesick that it _did_
seem as though it would kill me. Including the week it had taken me
to get from home to my regiment, three weeks had elapsed since I bid
good-bye to my friends, and I wanted to go home. I