In the morning Owen Kilgariff warmly thanked Captain Pollard for his entertainment, adding:— “As one gentleman with another, you have been free to offer, and I free to accept, your hospitality. Be very sure that I shall not presume upon this after I become a common soldier under your command, as I intend to do this morning if I have your permission.” Pollard protested that his battery was not a proper one for a man of Kilgariff’s culture and refinement to enlist in, explaining that such of the men as were not ex-criminals were illiterate mountaineers, wholly unfit for association on equal terms with him. For answer, Kilgariff said:— “I am told that you yourself enlisted here, Captain, when the conditions were even less alluring than now.” “Well, yes, certainly. But my case was peculiar.” “Perhaps mine is equally so,” answered the man. “At any rate, I very much want to enlist under your command, in a battery that, as I learn, usually manages to get into the thick of every fight and to stay there to the end.” A question was on Pollard’s lips, which he greatly wanted to ask, but he dared not. With the instinctive shrinking of a gentleman from the impertinence of personal questioning, Pollard found it impossible to ask this man how it happened that he was not already a soldier somewhere. And yet the matter was one which very naturally prompted questioning. The Confederate conscription laws had long ago brought into the army every able-bodied man in the South. How happened it, then, that this man of twenty-eight or thirty years of age, perfect in physique, had managed to avoid service until this fourth year of the war? And how was it, that one so manifestly eager now for service of the most active kind had been willing to keep out of the army for so long a time? As if divining the thought which Captain Pollard could not bring himself to formulate, Kilgariff said:— “Some day, perhaps, I shall be able to tell you how and why it is that I am not already a soldier. At present I cannot. But I assure you, on my honour as a gentleman, that there is absolutely no obstacle in the way of your enlistment of me in your command. I earnestly ask you to accept me as one of your cannoniers.” Accordingly, the man was enrolled as a private in the battery, and from that hour he never once presumed upon the acquaintance he had been privileged to form with the officers. With a scrupulosity greater than was common even in that rigidly disciplined command, he observed the distinction between officers and enlisted men. His behaviour indeed was that of one bred under the strict surveillance of martinet professors in a military school. He did all his military duties of whatever kind with a like attention to every detail of good conduct; always obeying like a soldier, never like a servant. That distinction is broad and very important as an index of character.