Prayers at each mess,--a prayer-meeting in the evening,--and then
rumour said the Colonel prayed on while his men slept. With his
battery of artillery trained to perfection under three years of
divine guidance, the gallant Colonel had stood in the line of battle
at Cold Harbour--name of frightful memory!--and when the enemy had
swarmed out of their intrenchments and swept back the whole line
just beyond him, his battery had stood like a cape in a storm-beaten
ocean, attacked on two sides at once; and for the half-hour that
elapsed before infantry support came up, the Colonel had ridden
slowly up and down his line, repeating in calm and godly accents,
"Give 'em hell, boys--give 'em hell!"--The Colonel's hand trembled
now as he held it out, and his voice was shrill and cracked as he
told what pleasure it gave him to meet General Montague's son.

"Why have we never seen you before?" asked Major Thorne. Montague
replied that he had spent all his life in Mississippi--his father
having married a Southern woman after the war. Once every year the
General had come to New York to attend the reunion of the Loyal
Legion of the State; but some one had had to stay at home with his
mother, Montague explained.

There were perhaps a hundred men in the room, and he was passed
about from group to group. Many of them had known his father
intimately. It seemed almost uncanny to him to meet them in the
body; to find them old and feeble, white-haired and wrinkled. As
they lived in the chambers of his memory, they were in their mighty
youth-heroes, transfigured and radiant, not subject to the power of
time.

Life on the big plantation had been a lonely one, especially for a