who have made the same journey--can
appreciate. The young provost-officer with the sleeve-knots desired to
offer me a delicate attention in return for my hand-furniture, and,
perhaps, to impress me in some sort with his sense of right, even though
he was of so wrong-headed a company. What a dainty, dew-sipping bunch of
violets would be to conscious beauty,--what a quaint volume of old
matter, dust-breeding and crumbling, would be to the blinking
scholar,--what refined gold, or gold ore, or gold stamped in the mint,
would be to a Wall-Street broker,--was this sergeant to myself. He was
the gift of a royal potentate who stood not upon little matters. There
was no calculation in the largess. I was to have the entire sergeant as
all my own. We fell a rod behind the officer, and trudged evenly along.

Although big with an evil design, I did not intend to address my
companion at once. The monotony of my walk, as I had at present nought
else to think of, I allowed to engage a number of my thoughts. I
hazarded conjectures upon many idle points, as my narrative will show. I
fell to watching my feet, and to placing them, as far as practicable, in
the footmarks of him who marched before me, instituting a sort of
comparison between our soles, finding his smaller than mine, as, behind
his back, I ventured upon his measure, watched the ruts in the road,
made the wagons in advance of us, and wondered if those behind us had
axle-trees as wide to an inch,--as they would have, if made by the same
contractor;--in which case, I mused, it is just possible the coming
train may move in this same rut. It seemed, then, a comfortable sort of
place. I saw the clouds of dust that had been provoked rising in anger
and rolling away sullenly many a day that weary summer, and that almost
buried the wretched company in which we journeyed, hover heavily above
the road-side, and choke the pretty weeds blooming there, by way of a
mean revenge upon its human tormentors. Thereupon I envied the blue
things, not their incubus, but their insignificance: for neither
artillery, nor camp wagon, nor passing prisoner was aught to them. I
wondered what each man here would say, if each man could tell his
thoughts. Primarily, I was convinced, each captive would declare himself
sick at heart: that is the only expression which will convey the sinking
feeling. Once I heard a bird sing gayly a clear-throated song from a
clump of trees; at which my heart grew sick also, to