The driver obscured a good deal of the front view, but he suddenly turned a rubicund and smiling face upon them.

“Waked up, hev ye?” he exclaimed.  “Wa’al it’s about time.  I’ve looked back from time to time an’ I wuzn’t at all shore whether you two gen’rals wuz alive or dead.  Sometimes when the wagon slanted a lot you would roll over each other, but it didn’t seem to make no diffunce.  Pow’ful good sleepers you are.”

“Yes,” said Harry.  “We’re two of the original Seven Sleepers.”

“I don’t doubt that you are two, but they wuz more’n seven.”

“How do you know?”

“‘Cause at least seven thousand in this train have been sleepin’ as hard as you wuz.  I guess you mean the ’rig’nal Seventy Thousand Sleepers.”

Harry’s spirits had returned after his long sleep.  He was a lad again.  The weight of Gettysburg no longer rested upon him.  The Army of Northern Virginia had merely made a single failure.  It would strike again and again, as hard as ever.

“It’s true that we’ve been slumbering,” he said, “but we’re as wide awake now as ever, Mr. Driver.”

“My name ain’t Driver,” said the man.

“Then what is it?”

“Jones, Dick Jones, which I hold to be a right proper name.”

“Not romantic, but short, simple and satisfying.”

“I reckon so.  Leastways, I’ve never wanted to change it.  I’m from No’th Calliny, an’ I’ve been followin’ Bobby Lee a pow’ful long distance from home.  Fine country up here in Pennsylvany, but I’d ruther be back in them No’th Calliny mountains.  You two young gen’rals may think it’s an easy an’ safe job drivin’ a wagon loaded with ammunition.  But s’pose you have to drive it right under fire, as you most often have to do, an’ then if a shell or somethin’ like it hits your wagon the whole thing goes off kerplunk, an’ whar are you?”

“It’s a sudden an’ easy death,” said Dalton, philosophically.

“Too sudden an’ too easy.  I don’t mind tellin’ you that seein’ men killed an’ wounded is a spo’t that’s beginnin’ to pall on me.  Reckon I’ve had enough of it to last me for the next thousand years.  I’ve forgot, if I ever knowed, what this war wuz started about.  Say, young fellers, I’ve got a wife back thar, a high-steppin’, fine-lookin’ gal not more’n twenty years old—­I’m just twenty-five myself, an’ we’ve got a year-old baby the cutest that wuz ever born.  Now, when I wuz lookin’ at that charge of Pickett’s men, an’ the whole world wuz blazin’ with fire, an’ all the skies wuz rainin’ steel and lead, an’ whar grass growed before, nothin’ but bayonets wuz growin’ then, do you know what I seed sometimes?”

“What was it?” asked Harry.