sunset, he came
slowly back across the field. A gripping nausea had seized upon him--a
nausea such as he had known before after that merry night at college. His
head throbbed, and as he walked he staggered like a drunken man. The
revulsion of his overwrought emotions had thrown him into a state of
sensibility almost hysterical.

The battle-field stretched grimly round him, and as the sunset was blotted
out, a gray mist crept slowly from the west. Here and there he saw men
looking for the wounded, and he heard one utter an impatient "Pshaw!" as he
lifted a half-cold body and let it fall. Rude stretchers went by him on
either side, and still the field seemed as thickly sown as before; on the
left, where a regiment of Zouaves had been cut down, there was a flash of
white and scarlet, as if the loose grass was strewn with great tropical
flowers. Among them he saw the reproachful eyes of dead and dying horses.

Before him, on the gradual slope of the hill, stood a group of abandoned
guns, and there was something almost human in the pathos of their utter
isolation. Around them the ground was scorched and blackened, and scattered
over the broken trails lay the men who had fallen at their post. He saw
them lying there in the fading daylight, with the sponges and the rammers
still in their hands, and he saw upon each man's face the look with which
he had met and recognized the end. Some were smiling, some staring, and one
lay grinning as if at a ghastly joke. Near him a boy, with the hair still
damp on his forehead, had fallen upon an uprooted blackberry vine, and the
purple stain of the berries was on his mouth. As Dan looked down upon him,
the smell of powder and burned grass came to him with a wave of sickness,
and turning he stumbled on across the field. At the first step his foot
struck upon something hard, and, picking it up, he saw that it was a Minie
ball, which, in passing through a man's spine, had been transformed into a
mass of mingled bone and lead. With a gesture of disgust he dropped it and
went on rapidly. A stretcher moved beside him, and the man on it, shot
through the waist, was saying in a whisper, "It is cold--cold--so cold."
Against his will, Dan found, he had fallen into step with the men who bore
the stretcher, and together they kept time to the words of the wounded
soldier who cried out ceaselessly that it was cold. On their way they
passed a group on horseback and, standing near it, a handsome artillery