In this battle, heavy as the losses were, the Confederates took but one prisoner.  At the third charge a tall, broad-shouldered captain, who seemed, like another son of Thetis, almost invulnerable, darted impetuously ahead of his men and reached the summit of the defence.  Useless bravery!  In an instant a volley point blank swept away the charging men behind him, and a gunner’s sabrethrust bore him to the ground within the works, where he lay stunned and bleeding beside the gun he had striven so hard to take.  The man who had captured him, wild with excitement and maddened with the powder that blackened him and the hot blood which jetted upon him, sprang down, spat upon him, spurned him with his foot, and would have dashed out his brains with the heavy hilt of his clubbed sword had not a strong hand grasped his uplifted wrist.

It was Fournier, who had watched the battle with an interest as intense as that of the most ardent Southerner in the battery, though widely different in character.  His interest was that of the naturalist who stands by eager and curious to see a rustic entrap some rara avis that he desires to study, to use for his experiment.  Better for the bird:  it can suffer and die.  Afterward what matter whether it stand neatly stuffed and mounted, a voiceless worshiper, in some glass mausoleum, or slowly moulder in a fence corner until its feathers are wafted far and wide, and only a little tuft of greener grass remains to its memory?  As our naturalist’s game was nobler and destined for more important study, so it was capable of lifelong suffering more subtle and intense.  Perhaps Fournier had not fully considered, in his eagerness to prove his hypothesis, the dangers to the subjects of his experiment.  Perhaps his mind was so intent upon the physical aspect of the questions that he had overlooked some of the intellectual and moral elements involved in the problem, and did not realize the enormities that would result should he succeed.  On the other hand, perhaps he saw them, realized them fully, and was the more deeply fascinated with the research because of its leading into such gloomy and mysterious regions of speculation.  Let us do him justice.  Science was his god, and this idolater was willing to endure any labor and privation and to assume any responsibility in her service.  Would that more who worship a greater God were as devoted!

He was a physiologist, and was simply engaged in an experimental investigation, yet in its progress he had already uncivilized a man whose eyes were beginning dimly to see the truth, had poisoned his mind with lies, and had hurled him into depths of Plutonian ignorance inconceivably more profound than his original estate; and now he was about to debase another fellow-creature of his own race, to tamper with his manhood, to confuse his identity, to render him among his own kindred and people perhaps tabooed, ostracised, despised—­perhaps an object of pity.  If he should succeed?