one hand at the loose canvas, while he seemed at the same time not unwilling to talk.  He was from Mississippi, he said, had been, at Georgetown College, and was so far imbued with letters that even the name of the literary humility before him was not new to his ears.  Of course I found it easy to come into magnetic relation with him, and to ask him without incivility what he was fighting for.  “Because I like the excitement of it,” he answered.—­I know those fighters with women’s mouths and boys’ cheeks; one such from the circle of my own friends, sixteen years old, slipped away from his nursery and dashed in under an assumed name among the red-legged Zouaves, in whose company he got an ornamental bullet-mark in one of the earliest conflicts of the war.

“Did you ever see a genuine Yankee?” said my Philadelphia friend to the young Mississippian.

“I have shot at a good many of them,” he replied, modestly, his woman’s mouth stirring a little, with a pleasant, dangerous smile.

The Dutch captain here put his foot into the conversation, as his ancestors used to put theirs into the scale, when they were buying furs of the Indians by weight,—­so much for the weight of a hand, so much for the weight of a foot.  It deranged the balance of our intercourse; there was no use in throwing a fly where a paving-stone had just splashed into the water, and I nodded a good-bye to the boy-fighter, thinking how much pleasanter it was for my friend the Captain to address him with unanswerable arguments and crushing statements in his own tent than it would be to meet him on some remote picket and offer his fair proportions to the quick eye of a youngster who would draw a bead on him before he had time to say dunder and blixum.

We drove back to the town.  No message.  After dinner still no message.  Dr. Cuyler, Chief Army-Hospital Inspector, is in town, they say.  Let us hunt him up,—­perhaps he can help us.

We found him at the Jones House.  A gentleman of large proportions, but of lively temperament, his frame knit in the North, I think, but ripened in Georgia, incisive, prompt, but good-humored, wearing his broad-brimmed, steeple-crowned felt hat with the least possible tilt on one side,—­a sure sign of exuberant vitality in a mature and dignified person like him,—­business-like in his ways, and not to be interrupted while occupied with another, but giving himself up heartily to the claimant who held him for the time.  He was so genial, so cordial, so encouraging, that it seemed as if the clouds, which had been thick all the morning, broke away as we came into his presence, and the sunshine of his large nature filled the air all around us.  He took the matter in hand at once, as if it were his own private affair.  In ten minutes he had a second telegraphic message on its way to Mrs. K—­at Hagerstown, sent through the Government channel from the State Capitol,—­one so direct and urgent that I should be sure of an answer to it, whatever became of the one I had sent in the morning.