with, cold, two lying near the edge oL the woods, in a big hole made by a shell, while the other stood guard.  They had seen nothing and heard nothing except the ordinary sounds of the night.  The clouds reflected the peculiar glow of many fires in front.  It was not long till day.  The two men, my companions on post, whispered together, and then proposed that I should take the first watch.  Willis had returned to the line with, the relieved vedettes.  I had no objection to taking the first watch, yet I hesitated, simply because the two men had whispered.  I fancied there was some reason for the request, and I asked bluntly why they had decided it was my turn without giving me a voice in the matter.  You know it is the custom to decide such affairs by lot, unless some man volunteers for the worst place.  They replied that they were old friends, and that as I was a stranger to them, the detail being made up from various companies, they preferred lying together.

This explanation, did not seem very satisfactory, for the reason that in two hours we should all be relieved; yet I consented, and they lay down in the hole, which was little more than a mud-puddle, for fear of some sudden, volley from the rebels.

The position of the man on watch at this point was just at the left oblique from the other men, say about ten paces, and very near to a tree which stood apart from the rest of the forest, a scraggy pine of second growth, not very tall, but thick and heavy, with, its limbs starting from the trunk as low as eight feet from the ground.  I stood near this tree, within reach of it by a leap.  Our nearest vedette posts, right and left, were a hundred yards from me—­the one on the left being in the woods, that on the right in the open.  The country called the Peninsula is low and flat and very swampy in many parts, and the great quantity of rain that had now fallen for days and days had rendered the whole land a loblolly, to use a common figure.  I saw that just in front of me, about thirty yards, there was a shallow ravine, and I began to think that it was possible for an enterprising squad of rebels to sneak through this ravine and get very near us before we knew it, and perhaps capture us; such things had been done, if the truth was told, not only by the rebels, but by many other people at war.

Beyond the ravine were the Confederates, their skirmish line about three hundred yards beyond it, and their nightly vedette posts nobody knew where, for they used similar economy to ours in withdrawing their vedettes in the day.  The Doctor’s talks, many of which I can but barely mention, had opened my eyes a little to the possibility of accurate inferences, that is to say, his philosophy of cause and effect, or purpose, as he liked better to call it, had been urged upon me so frequently and so profoundly that I had become more observant; he had made me think of the relations of things.  Philosophy, he had said, should be carried into everyday life and into