of eyebrow, “he had the cheek to correct my Latin for me.”  In short, Quite So was a daily problem to the members of Mess 6.  Whenever he was absent, and Blakely and Curtis and Strong and I got together in the tent, we discussed him, evolving various theories to explain why he never wrote to anybody and why nobody ever wrote to him.  Had the man committed some terrible crime, and fled to the army to hide his guilt?  Blakely suggested that he must have murdered “the old folks.”  What did he mean by eternally conning that tattered Latin grammar?  And was his name Bladburn, anyhow?  Even his imperturbable amiability became suspicious.  And then his frightful reticence!  If he was the victim of any deep grief or crushing calamity, why didn’t he seem unhappy?  What business had he to be cheerful?

“It’s my opinion,” said Strong, “that he’s a rival Wandering Jew; the original Jacobs, you know, was a dark fellow.”

Blakely inferred from something Bladburn had said, or something he had not said,—­which was more likely,—­that he had been a schoolmaster at some period of his life.

“Schoolmaster be hanged!” was Strong’s comment.  “Can you fancy a schoolmaster going about conjugating baby verbs out of a dratted little spelling-book?  No, Quite So has evidently been a—­a—­Blest if I can imagine what he’s been!”

Whatever John Bladburn had been, he was a lonely man.  Whenever I want a type of perfect human isolation, I shall think of him, as he was in those days, moving remote, self-contained, and alone in the midst of two hundred thousand men.

II

The Indian summer, with its infinite beauty and tenderness, came like a reproach that year to Virginia.  The foliage, touched here and there with prismatic tints, drooped motionless in the golden haze.  The delicate Virginia creeper was almost minded to put forth its scarlet buds again.  No wonder the lovely phantom—­this dusky Southern sister of the pale Northern June—­lingered not long with us, but, filling the once peaceful glens and valleys with her pathos, stole away rebukefully before the savage enginery of man.

The preparations that had been going on for months in arsenals and foundries at the North were nearly completed.  For weeks past the air had been filled with rumors of an advance; but the rumor of to-day refuted the rumor of yesterday, and the Grand Army did not move.  Heintzelman’s corps was constantly folding its tents, like the Arabs, and as silently stealing away; but somehow it was always in the same place the next morning.  One day, at length, orders came down for our brigade to move.

“We’re going to Richmond, boys!” shouted Strong, thrusting his head in at the tent; and we all cheered and waved our caps like mad.  You see, Big Bethel and Bull Run and Ball’s Bluff (the Bloody B’s, as we used to call them,) hadn’t taught us any better sense.