did not know what it meant to be ordered around by Tom, Dick, and Harry, whom they had known familiarly all their lives, in the village or on the farm.  It is quite within the probabilities that this same thing was happening all over the South.  James Redpath recognised the justice of this assumption, and furnished the following instance in support of it.  During a short stay in East Tennessee he was in a citizen colonel’s tent one day, talking, when a big private appeared at the door, and without salute or other circumlocution said to the colonel: 

‘Say, Jim, I’m a-goin’ home for a few days.’

‘What for?’

’Well, I hain’t b’en there for a right smart while, and I’d like to see how things is comin’ on.’

‘How long are you going to be gone?’

‘’Bout two weeks.’

‘Well don’t be gone longer than that; and get back sooner if you can.’

That was all, and the citizen officer resumed his conversation where the private had broken it off.  This was in the first months of the war, of course.  The camps in our part of Missouri were under Brigadier-General Thomas H. Harris.  He was a townsman of ours, a first-rate fellow, and well liked; but we had all familiarly known him as the sole and modest-salaried operator in our telegraph office, where he had to send about one dispatch a week in ordinary times, and two when there was a rush of business; consequently, when he appeared in our midst one day, on the wing, and delivered a military command of some sort, in a large military fashion, nobody was surprised at the response which he got from the assembled soldiery: 

‘Oh, now, what’ll you take to don’t, Tom Harris!’

It was quite the natural thing.  One might justly imagine that we were hopeless material for war.  And so we seemed, in our ignorant state; but there were those among us who afterward learned the grim trade; learned to obey like machines; became valuable soldiers; fought all through the war, and came out at the end with excellent records.  One of the very boys who refused to go out on picket duty that night, and called me an ass for thinking he would expose himself to danger in such a foolhardy way, had become distinguished for intrepidity before he was a year older.

I did secure my picket that night—­not by authority, but by diplomacy.  I got Bowers to go, by agreeing to exchange ranks with him for the time being, and go along and stand the watch with him as his subordinate.  We stayed out there a couple of dreary hours in the pitchy darkness and the rain, with nothing to modify the dreariness but Bowers’s monotonous growlings at the war and the weather; then we began to nod, and presently found it next to impossible to stay in the saddle; so we gave up the tedious job, and went back to the camp without waiting for the relief guard.  We rode into camp without interruption or objection from anybody, and the enemy could have done the same, for there were no sentries.  Everybody was asleep; at midnight there was nobody to send out another picket, so none was sent.  We never tried to establish a watch at night again, as far as I remember, but we generally kept a picket out in the daytime.