than "that they had failed this time." There was no panic, no despair. They saw they had failed from sheer inability, not a want of effort or disposition to accomplish their task. They retreated, but not rushing wildly far to the rear. The powerful aided the weak, the strong bore off the wounded, and each came back as he had advanced, cool, composed, and serious. The veteran when in camp had no curiosity. His indifference to matters going on around him was positively appalling to a stranger or a raw recruit. They would often be in camp for a month without knowing or caring what regiment was encamped next to them. A raw recruit of two months' standing was better authority on all _on dits_ of camp, the location of other regiments, the names of their officers, and similar general information, than a veteran of three years' standing. The veteran laughed at the knowledge of the raw recruit, wondered where the utility of that information was, boasted of superior practical knowledge, and good-naturedly taught the raw recruit the more useful lessons of how to march easily, sleep well, provide himself with little luxuries, and how to take care of himself generally. The veteran had curious modes of making himself comfortable, which the raw recruit learned only from practice. Camp the veteran in a forest over night, and he would sleep under his shelter-tent raised high and made commodious, and on a soft bed of dry leaves. Encamp him for a month in the same forest, and he would live in a log house, sleep on good clean straw, dine off a wooden table, drink from glassware made from the empty ale or porter bottles from the sutler's tent, comb his whiskers before a framed looking-glass on a pine-board mantle-shelf, and look with the air of a millionaire through a foot and a half square window-frame on the camped world around him. The rebels used to call our men, when working on forts, rifle-pits, etc., "beavers in blue." The veteran was a regular beaver when building his house. He would buy, beg, or steal from the quarter-master (a species of theft recognized by the camp code of morals as entirely justifiable) the only tool he needed, an axe. With this he would cut, hew, dig, drive--any thing you like, in fact. With his axe he would cut the logs for his cabin--miniature logs, two inches in diameter--trim them to the proper length, and drive the necessary piles. With his axe he would cut the brushwood or the evergreen, and thatch his roof. With his axe he would dig a mud-hole in which to make his plaster for filling the crevices of the logs, and thus shut out the cold. Doors, chimneys, benches, chairs, tables, all the furniture of his commodious house, he would make with the same instrument. When all was finished, he would sit comfortably down on his cot and laugh at the superficial knowledge of the raw recruit who had been shivering in his shelter-tent, looking on in amazement at the magical labors of the "beavers in blue."