I replied promptly, "Either an Indian girl's or an American young lady's, whose ancestors have been two hundred years in the country." It was the latter. Such feet _lift_ or leap, as if raised every time to go over entangled grass or sticks. Like an Indian, I instinctively observe everybody's _ears_, which are unerring indices of character. I can sustain, and always could endure, incredible fasts, but for this I need coffee in the morning. "Mark Twain"--whom I saw yesterday at his villa, as I correct this proof--also has this peculiar Indian-like or American faculty of observing innumerable little things which no European would ever think of. There is, I think, a great deal of "hard old Injun" in him. The most beautiful of his works are the three which are invariably bound in silk or muslin. They are called "The Three Daughters, or the Misses Clemens." It occurred to me, after I had recorded the events of our short but truly vigorous and eventful campaign, to write to R. W. Gilder and ask him--_quid memoriae datum est_--"what memories he had of that great war, wherein we starved and swore, and all but died." There are men in whose letters we are as sure to find genial _life_ as a _spaccio di vino_ or wine-shop in a Florentine street, and this poet-editor is one of them. And he replied with an epistle not at all intended for type, which I hereby print without his permission, and in defiance of all the custom or courtesy which inspires gentlemen of the press. "_May_ _8th_, _1893_. "EDITORIAL DEPARTMENT, THE CENTURY MAGAZINE, "UNION SQUARE, NEW YORK. "MY DEAR LELAND: How your letter carries me back! Do you know that one night when I was trudging along in the dark over a road-bed where had been scattered some loose stones to form a foundation, I heard you and another comrade talking me over in the way to which you refer in your letter? Well, it was either you or the other comrade who said you had given me something to eat, and I know that I must have seemed very fragile, and at times woe-begone. I was possibly the youngest in the crowd. I was nineteen, and really enjoyed it immensely notwithstanding. "I remember you in those days as a splendid expressor of our miseries. You had a magnificent vocabulary, wherewith you could eloquently and precisely describe our general condition of starvation, mud, ill-equippedness, and over-work. As I think of those days, I hear reverberating over the mountain-roads the call, 'Cannoneers to the wheels!' and in imagination I plunge knee-deep into the mire and grab the spokes of the caisson. {266a} "Do you remember the night we spent at the forge? I burnt my knees at the fire out-doors, while in my ears was pouring a deluge from the clouds. I finally gave it up, and spent the rest of the night crouching upon the fire-bed of the forge itself, most uncomfortably.