Ferris’s regiment was sent to a part of the southwest, where he saw a good deal of fighting and fever and ague. At the end of two years, spent alternately in the field and the hospital, he was riding out near the camp one morning in unusual spirits, when two men in butternut fired at him: one had the mortification to miss him; the bullet of the other struck him in the arm. There was talk of amputation at first, but the case was finally managed without. In Ferris’s state of health it was quite the same an end of his soldiering. He came North sick and maimed and poor. He smiled now to think of confronting Florida in any imperative or challenging spirit; but the current of his hopeless melancholy turned more and more towards her. He had once, at a desperate venture, written to her at Providence, but he had got no answer. He asked of a Providence man among the artists in New York, if he knew the Vervains; the Providence man said that he did know them a little when he was much younger; they had been abroad a great deal; he believed in a dim way that they were still in Europe. The young one, he added, used to have a temper of her own. “Indeed!” said Ferris stiffly. The one fast friend whom he found in New York was the governor’s dashing aide. The enthusiasm of this recruiter of regiments had not ceased with Ferris’s departure for the front; the number of disabled officers forbade him to lionize any one of them, but he befriended Ferris; he made a feint of discovering the open secret of his poverty, and asked how he could help him. “I don’t know,” said Ferris, “it looks like a hopeless case, to me.” “Oh no it isn’t,” retorted his friend, as cheerfully and confidently as he had promised him that he should not be shot. “Didn’t you bring back any pictures from Venice with you?” “I brought back a lot of sketches and studies. I’m sorry to say that I loafed a good deal there; I used to feel that I had eternity before me; and I was a theorist and a purist and an idiot generally. There are none of them fit to be seen.” “Never mind; let’s look at them.” They hunted out Ferris’s property from a catch-all closet in the studio of a sculptor with whom he had left them, and who expressed a polite pleasure in handing them over to Ferris rather than to his heirs and assigns. “Well, I’m not sure that I share your satisfaction, old fellow,” said the painter ruefully; but he unpacked the sketches. Their inspection certainly revealed a disheartening condition of half-work. “And I can’t do anything to help the matter for the present,” groaned Ferris, stopping midway in the business, and making as if to shut the case again.