We had lost General Pender at Gettysburg.  We were now Wilcox’s division.  We had camp guard and picket duty.

Since the Captain’s death the battalion of sharp-shooters had been dissolved, and I was back in Company H. The life was monotonous.  Some conscripts were received into each company.  Many of the old men would never return to us.  Some were lying with two inches of earth above their breasts; some were in the distant South on crutches they must always use.

The spirit of the regiment was unbroken.  The men were serious.  Captain Barnwell read prayers at night in the company.

I thought much but disconnectedly, and was given to solitude.  I made an object of myself.  My condition appealed to my sympathy.  Where had there ever been such an experience?  I thought of myself as Berwick, and pitied him.  I talked to him, mentally, calling him you.

Dr. Frost was beyond my reach.  I wanted to talk to him.  He had been promoted, and was elsewhere.

At night I had dreams, and they were strange dreams.  For many successive nights I could see myself, and always I thought of the “me” that I saw as a different person from the “me” that saw.

My health suffered greatly, but I did not report to the surgeon.

Somehow I began to feel for my unknown friends.  They had long ago given me up for dead.

Perhaps, however, some were still hoping against certainty.  My mind was filling with fancies concerning them—­concerning her.  How I ever began to think of such, a possibility I could not know.

My fancies embraced everything.  My family might be rich and powerful and intelligent; it, might be humble, even being the strong likelihood was that it was neither, but was of medium worth.

My fancy—­it began in a dream—­pictured the face of a woman, young and sweet weeping for me.  I wept for her and for myself.  Who was she?  Was she all fancy?

Since I had been in Company H, I had never spoken to a woman except the nurses in the hospitals.  I had seen many women in Richmond and elsewhere.  No face of my recollection fitted with the face of my dream.  None seemed it’s equal in sweetness and dignity.

I had written love letters at the dictation of one or two of the men.  I had read love stories.  I felt as the men had seemed to feel, and as the lovers in the stories had seemed to feel.

No one knew, since the Captain’s death, even the short history of myself that I knew.  I grew morose.  The men avoided me, all but one—­Jerry Butler.  Somehow I found myself messing with him.  He was a great forager, and kept us both in food.  The rations were almost regular, but the fat bacon and mouldy meal turned my stomach.  The other men were in good health, and ate heartily of the coarse food given them.  Butler had bacon and meal to sell.

The men wondered what was the matter with me.  Their wonder did not exceed my own.  Butler invited my confidence, but I could not decide to say a word; one word would have made it necessary to tell him all I knew.  He would have thought me insane.