down, d----d the Captain, his Brigadier, and
everything belonging to the Brigade, until I thought it a little too
hard for a man who had had a Sunday School education in his young days
to listen to, and I left him still cursing.'"

"He will court-martial the Captain," said the Colonel, who had entered
the tent, "for signal contempt of the Regular Service. I recollect a
charge of that kind preferred by a Regular Lieutenant against an
Adjutant of the ---- Maine, down in the Peninsula. In one of our marches
the Adjutant had occasion to ride rapidly by the Regiment to which the
Lieutenant belonged. The Lieutenant hailed him--told him to stop. The
Adjutant knowing his duty, and that he had no authority to halt him,
continued his pace, but found himself for nearly a month afterward in
arrest under a charge of 'Signal contempt for the Regular Service.'"

Sigel's hardy Teutons lined the road in the vicinity of New Baltimore,
through which village the route lay on the following day. Part of his
corps had some days previously occupied the mountain gaps in the Bull
Run range on the left. Other troops, led by a Commander whose strategy
was singularly efficacious to keep him out of fights, were passing to
the front, leaving a fighting General of undoubted prowess in European
and American history, in the rear. Inefficient himself, and perhaps
designedly so, his policy could not, with safety to his own reputation,
allow of efficiency elsewhere.

That night our Regiment encamped in one of the old pine fields common in
Virginia. The softness of the decaying foliage of the pine which covered
the ground as a cushion was admirably adapted to repose, and upon it the
men rested, while the gentle evening breeze sighed among the boughs
above them, as if in sympathy with disappointed hopes and sacrifices
made in vain.

"Stragglers and marauders, sir," said a Sergeant of the Provost Guard,
saluting the Colonel, who was one of the circle lying cozily about the
fire, pointing as he spoke to a squad of way-worn, wo-begone men under
guard in his rear. "Here is a list of their offences. I was ordered to
report them for punishment."

"A new wrinkle, that," said the Colonel, as the Sergeant left. "Our
Brigadier must be acting upon his own responsibility. Our General of
Division would certainly never have permitted such an opportunity slip
for employing the time of officers in Courts-martial. That list would
have kept one of our Division Courts in