fire. He felt his breath coming in long deep inhalations; he could think
faster and more clearly than at other times, and he knew that his hands
were steady and his aim was good. Somehow it seemed that years of life
were crowded into those few minutes, and he retired reluctantly when the
order came.

His regiment was in the Army of the Potomac, and the story of its waiting
and blundering and magnificent fighting need not be told again in these
pages. Jim was one of thousands of brave, intelligent fighters who did not
rise to the command of a division or even of a regiment. He was a
lieutenant in Company E when the Nineteenth marched down the Emmittsburg
Pike, through Gettysburg and out to the ridge beyond, to hold it until
reenforcements should come.

They fought there during four long hours, until the thin line of blue
could hold no longer, and gray ranks under Ewell and Fender had enveloped
both flanks. Then sullenly they came back through the town, still firing
defiantly, and cursing the help that had not come. It was during this
retreat that Jim was hit, but he did not drop. Somehow--though as in a
dream--he kept with his regiment, and it was not until they were rallied
in the cemetery on the other side of the town that he pitched forward and
lay quite still.

Everybody knows how the Eleventh Corps held the cemetery through the two
bloody days that followed. But Jim was unconscious of it all, for he lay
on a cot in the Sanitary Commission tent, raving in delirium. And the
surgeons and nurses looked at him gravely and wondered with every hour why
he did not die.

But, as one of his comrades had said, "it took a lot of pounding to lick