The long night wore itself out at last, and then the negro came to us with the news that the alarm had manifestly been a false one, and that breakfast would soon be ready.  Straightway we were light-hearted again, and the world was bright, and life as full of hope and promise as ever —­for we were young then.  How long ago that was!  Twenty-four years.

The mongrel child of philology named the night’s refuse Camp Devastation, and no soul objected.  The Masons gave us a Missouri country breakfast, in Missourian abundance, and we needed it:  hot biscuits; hot ’wheat bread’ prettily criss-crossed in a lattice pattern on top; hot corn pone; fried chicken; bacon, coffee, eggs, milk, buttermilk, etc.;—­and the world may be confidently challenged to furnish the equal to such a breakfast, as it is cooked in the South.

We stayed several days at Mason’s; and after all these years the memory of the dullness, the stillness and lifelessness of that slumberous farm-house still oppresses my spirit as with a sense of the presence of death and mourning.  There was nothing to do, nothing to think about; there was no interest in life.  The male part of the household were away in the fields all day, the women were busy and out of our sight; there was no sound but the plaintive wailing of a spinning-wheel, forever moaning out from some distant room—­the most lonesome sound in nature, a sound steeped and sodden with homesickness and the emptiness of life.  The family went to bed about dark every night, and as we were not invited to intrude any new customs, we naturally followed theirs.  Those nights were a hundred years long to youths accustomed to being up till twelve.  We lay awake and miserable till that hour every time, and grew old and decrepit waiting through the still eternities for the clock-strikes.  This was no place for town boys.  So at last it was with something very like joy that we received news that the enemy were on our track again.  With a new birth of the old warrior spirit, we sprang to our places in line of battle and fell back on Camp Ralls.

Captain Lyman had taken a hint from Mason’s talk, and he now gave ordered that our camp should be guarded against surprise by the posting of pickets.  I was ordered to place a picket at the forks of the road in Hyde’s prairie.  Night shut down black and threatening.  I told Sergeant Bowers to go out to that place and stay till midnight; and, just as I was expecting, he said he wouldn’t do it.  I tried to get others to go, but all refused.  Some excused themselves on account of the weather; but the rest were frank enough to say they wouldn’t go in any kind of weather.  This kind of thing sounds odd now, and impossible, but it seemed a perfectly natural thing to do.  There were scores of little camps scattered over Missouri where the same thing was happening.  These camps were composed of young men who had been born and reared to a sturdy independence, and who