“What State do you come from?”

“Georgy.”

“What part of Georgia?”

“Midway.”

—­[How odd that is!  My father was settled for seven years as pastor over the church at Midway, Georgia, and this youth is very probably a grandson or great grandson of one of his parishioners.]

“Where did you go to church when you were at home?”

“Never went inside ‘f a church b’t once in m’ life.”

“What did you do before you became a soldier?”

“Nothin’.”

“What do you mean to do when you get back?”

“Nothin’.”

Who could have any other feeling than pity for this poor human weed, this dwarfed and etiolated soul, doomed by neglect to an existence but one degree above that of the idiot?

With the group was a lieutenant, buttoned close in his gray coat,—­one button gone, perhaps to make a breastpin for some fair traitorous bosom.  A short, stocky man, undistinguishable from one of the “subject race” by any obvious meanderings of the sangre azul on his exposed surfaces.  He did not say much, possibly because he was convinced by the statements and arguments of the Dutch captain.  He had on strong, iron-heeled shoes, of English make, which he said cost him seventeen dollars in Richmond.

I put the question, in a quiet, friendly way, to several of the prisoners, what they were fighting for.  One answered, “For our homes.”  Two or three others said they did not know, and manifested great indifference to the whole matter, at which another of their number, a sturdy fellow, took offence, and muttered opinions strongly derogatory to those who would not stand up for the cause they had been fighting for.  A feeble; attenuated old man, who wore the Rebel uniform, if such it could be called, stood by without showing any sign of intelligence.  It was cutting very close to the bone to carve such a shred of humanity from the body politic to make a soldier of.

We were just leaving, when a face attracted me, and I stopped the party.  “That is the true Southern type,” I said to my companion.  A young fellow, a little over twenty, rather tall, slight, with a perfectly smooth, boyish cheek, delicate, somewhat high features, and a fine, almost feminine mouth, stood at the opening of his tent, and as we turned towards him fidgeted a little nervously with 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.