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.

“Did you ever see a genuine Yankee?” said my Philadelphia friend to the young Mississippian.

“I have shot at a good many of them,” he replied, modestly, his woman’s mouth stirring a little, with a pleasant, dangerous smile.

The Dutch captain here put his foot into the conversation, as his ancestors used to put theirs into the scale, when they were buying furs of the Indians by weight,—­so much for the weight of a hand, so much for the weight of a foot.  It deranged the balance of our intercourse; there was no use in throwing a fly where a paving-stone had just splashed into the water, and I nodded a good-by to the boy-fighter, thinking how much pleasanter it was for my friend the Captain to address him with unanswerable arguments and crushing statements in his own tent than it would be to meet him upon some remote picket station and offer his fair proportions to the quick eye of a youngster who would draw a bead on him before he had time to say dunder and blixum.