priestess, but a brokenhearted girl, who only asks to be
led away to some place where she can weep till her lover returns.

III

There was to be a great battle the next day. The two armies had been
long manoeuvring for position, and now they stood like wrestlers who
have selected their holds and, with body braced against body, knee
against knee, wait for the signal to begin the struggle. There had
been during the afternoon some brisk fighting, but a common desire to
postpone the decisive contest till the morrow had prevented the main
forces from becoming involved. Philip's regiment had thus far only been
engaged in a few trifling skirmishes, barely enough to stir the blood.
This was to be its first battle, and the position to which it had been
allotted promised a bloody baptism in the morning. The men were in
excellent heart, but as night settled down, there was little or no
merriment to be heard about the camp-fires. Most were gathered in
groups, discussing in low tones the chances of the morrow. Some, knowing
that every fibre of muscle would be needed for the work before them, had
wisely gone to sleep, while here and there a man, heedless of the talk
going on about him, was lying on his back staring up at the darkening
sky, thinking.

As the twilight deepened, Philip strolled to the top of a little knoll
just out of the camp and sat down, with a vague notion of casting up
accounts a little in view of the final settlement which very possibly
might come for him next day. But the inspiration of the scene around him
soon diverted his mind from personal engrossments. Some distance down
the lines he could see the occasional flash of a gun, where a battery
was lazily shelling a piece of woods which it was desirable to keep the
enemy from occupying during the night. A burning barn in that direction
made a flare on the sky. Over behind the wooded hills where the
Confederates lay, rockets were going up, indicating the exchange of
signals and the perfecting of plans which might mean defeat and ruin to
him and his the next day. Behind him, within the Federal lines, clouds
of dust, dimly outlined against the glimmering landscape, betrayed the
location of the roads along which artillery, cavalry, infantry were
hurrying eagerly forward to take their assigned places for the morrow's
work.

Who said that men fear death? Who concocted that fable for old wives? He
should have stood that night with Philip in the midst of a host