and all o’ them a-laughing fit to burst!� Are you displeased, dear lad?� Then, just at night, I came up with the rear-guard, where they were searching for strayed cattle; and I stowed myself away in a broken-down wagon, full of powder — quietly, like a mouse, no one dreaming that I was not the slender youth I looked. So none molested me where I lay amid the powder casks and sacking.”

She smiled wistfully, and stood caressing my arms with her eager little hands, as though to calm the wrath to come.

“I heard your regiment’s pretty conch-horn in the morning,” she said, “and slipped out of my wagon and edged forward amid all that swearing, sweating confusion, noticed not at all by anybody, save when a red-head Jersey sergeant bawled at me to man a