The postscript philosopher began: “I shall never forget my first battle. It wasn’t much of a battle either, but it was lively while it lasted. Unfortunately for me it was one of those fights where you have to wait for the enemy to begin. I was tender then. I had just left home, and every time I looked at the little knickknacks mother and the girls had given me to make camp life comfortable,--for bless my soul they thought we _lived_ in camp,--every time I looked at these things I grew teary. There oughtn’t to be any bric-à-brac of that kind given to a fellow when he goes into the army. It isn’t fit. It worries him.” He was silent for a minute. So were the rest of us. We all had bric-à-brac to remember. He resumed: “We were lying there in the edge of a piece of woods with a sloping meadow in front, crossed by a stone wall heavily overgrown with vines. At the other edge of the meadow was another strip of woods. The enemy were somewhere in there. We knew they were coming, because the pickets had been driven in, and we stood there waiting for them. The waiting was the worst of it, and as we waited I got to feeling in my pockets and--pulled out a little, old three-cornered pincushion. Conscience knows I wouldn’t have pulled out that pincushion at that particular minute to have won a battle. I’ve got it now. I never had any use for a pincushion because I never could pin any two things together the way a woman can, but a man can’t make his womenkind believe that: I’ve kept it all through the war, and when I go back home--if it suits the Yankees that I ever go back at all--I’m going to give it as a souvenir to the little sister that made it for me. And I’m going to tell her that it was that pincushion, little three-cornered thing that it is, that made a man out of me that day. “My first thought as I pulled it out was that I wanted to go home and give the war up; but then came another kind of a thought. I said, ‘The little girl wouldn’t have given that pincushion to me if she hadn’t understood that I was going off to fight for the country.’ So I said to myself, ‘Old boy, you’ve got to stand your hand pat.’ And now whenever we go into battle I always brace myself up a little by feeling in my breeches pocket and sort of shaping out that pincushion.” From Joe: “It’s a good story, but the rest of us haven’t any pincushions. Besides that, it’s raining.” I couldn’t help observing that Joe drew that afternoon’s letter out of his pocket and fumbled it a little, while the long-legged mountaineer was straightening out his limbs and his thoughts for his share in the conversation. He said in basso profundo: “The fact is I’m always so skeered just before a fight that I can’t remember afterwards how I did feel. I know only this much, that that last three minutes before the bullets begin to whistle and the shells to howl, takes more out of me than six hours straightaway fightin’ afterwards does.” From Joe: “There must be a lot in you at the start, then.”