been. He was honest enough to take no credit for the clean change in his
life--no other life was possible; but he was learning the practical
value and mental comfort of straight living as he had never learned
them before. And he was not so prone to metaphysics and morbid
self-examination as he once was, and he shook off a mood of that kind
when it came--impatiently--as he shook it off now. He was a soldier now,
and his province was action and no more thought than his superiors
allowed him. And, standing thus, at sunrise, on the plunging bow of the
ship, with his eager, sensitive face splitting the swift wind--he might
have stood to any thoughtful American who knew his character and his
history as a national hope and a national danger. The nation, measured
by its swift leap into maturity, its striking power to keep going at the
same swift pace, was about his age. South, North, and West it had lived,
or was living, his life. It had his faults and his virtues; like him, it
was high-spirited, high-minded, alert, active, manly, generous, and with
it, as with him, the bad was circumstantial, trivial, incipient; the
good was bred in the Saxon bone and lasting as rock--if the surface evil
were only checked in time and held down. Like him, it needed, like a
Titan, to get back, now and then, to the earth to renew its strength.
And the war would send the nation to the earth as it would send him, if
he but lived it through.

There was little perceptible change in the American officer and
soldier, now that the work was about actually to begin. A little more
soberness was apparent. Everyone was still simple, natural,
matter-of-fact. But that night, doubtless, each man dreamed his dream.
The West Point stripling saw in his empty shoulder-straps a single bar,
as the man above him saw two tiny bars where he had been so proud of
one. The Captain led a battalion, the Major charged at the head of a
thousand strong; the Colonel plucked a star, and the Brigadier heard the