The Southern spring was at hand, a mist of young leaf and bloom, a sound of birds, a sapphire sky, a vapour, a warmth, a rhythm. Edward Cary loved it, and said that he did so, lying after supper, on the bank of the Tallahatchie, under the cotton-bale rampart of the cotton-bale fort that was to keep the enemy out of the Yazoo. The rest of the mess agreed—lovely spring, lovely evening! They lit corn-cob pipes and clay pipes and fig-stem pipes, and stretched themselves on a meagre bit of dry earth, beside a clump of Spanish bayonet. The sun dipped behind the woods across the river, leaving air and water an exquisite coral. There were seven men—five privates, a corporal, and a sergeant-major. All were tall and all were lean and none was over thirty. One bore an old Huguenot name and the forbear of one was a Highland chief. The others were mainly of English stock, names of Devon, Surrey, and Sussex. Two were university men, sons of great planters, born into a sunny and settled world that after their majority overclouded. Three had less of that kind of fortune and had left for the war a lawyer’s office, a tobacco warehouse, and an experiment in mining. The sergeant-major was of the yeoman type, a quiet man with little book learning and a name in the regiment for courage and resource. The seventh man, very young, a grown-up-anyhow bit of mortality, who until he came to handle steel had worked in iron, stood next, perhaps, to Edward Cary in the affections of the mess. Dreadful as was this war, it had as a by-product the lessening of caste. Men came together and worked together as men, not as conventions. “Yes, it is lovely,” said the warehouse man. “I used to think a deal about beauty.” “Woman’s beauty?” “No. Just plain beauty. Cloud or sea or face or anywhere you found it. At the end of every furrow, as Jim might say.” Jim, who was the sergeant, shook out rings of smoke. “It ain’t only at the end of the furrow. I’ve seen it in the middle.” The worker in iron stretched his thin body, hands under his young head. “I like fall better’n spring. Late fall when it’s all red and still, and at night there are shooting stars. Spring makes me sad.” “What are you doing with sadness?” asked Edward. “You had as well talk of Jack-o’-Lantern being sad!—I like all seasons, each with its proper magnificence! Look at that pine, black as wrath—” “Look at the pink water about the old Star of the West— ‘The charmed water burnt alway A still and awful red.’” “I hated to see the Star sunken. After all her fighting—Sumter and all—” “Well, we’ve put her where she’ll fight again! It ’s a kind of Valhalla ending to lie there across Grant’s path.”