new leg." But Suydam said nothing; he only unclosed his eyes languidly
and smiled farewell to us.

The four of us who were left alive and unhurt that shameful July day sat
gloomily smoking our brier-wood pipes, thinking our thoughts, and
listening to the rain pattering against the canvas. That, and the
occasional whine of a hungry cur, foraging on the outskirts of the camp
for a stray bone, alone broke the silence, save when a vicious drop of
rain detached itself meditatively from the ridge-pole of the tent, and
fell upon the wick of our tallow candle, making it "cuss," as Ned Strong
described it. The candle was in the midst of one of its most profane
fits when Blakely, knocking the ashes from his pipe and addressing no
one in particular, but giving breath, unconsciously as it were, to the
result of his cogitations, observed that "it was considerable of a
fizzle."

"The 'on to Richmond' business?"

"Yes."

"I wonder what they'll do about it over yonder," said Curtis, pointing
over his right shoulder. By "over yonder" he meant the North in general
and Massachusetts especially. Curtis was a Boston boy, and his sense of
locality was so strong that, during all his wanderings in Virginia, I do
not believe there was a moment, day or night, when he could not have
made a bee-line for Faneuil Hall.

"Do about it?" cried Strong. "They'll make about two hundred thousand
blue flannel trousers and send them along, each pair with a man in
it,--all the short men in the long trousers, and all the tall men in the