At Petersburg we began to get something like regular rations, though they were very meagre and of extremely bad quality. It was, perhaps, under the influence of this prolonged starvation and hard work that the men fell victims to the great religious revival of that time. It was the ecstasy of anchorites. It proved, if anything ever did, the efficacy of fasting as an inducement to fervid prayer. Saint Simeon Stylites perched on top of his tower was no better subject of religious enthusiasm than were these worn out and starved veterans, whose cause was an object of perpetual worship. They believed no longer in themselves; they no longer looked even to their generals for results. The time and the mood had come when they trusted God alone to give them victory. Starvation had made them devotees. MY FRIEND PHIL[2] To begin with, Phil was black. The reader will please understand that the word “black” is here used in its literal, and not in its conventional, sense. Phil was actually as well as ethnologically black. There was no trace of a lighter tint anywhere in his complexion. Not a suspicion of brown appeared in his cheeks, and even his great thick lips, protruding far beyond the outposts of his nose, were as sable as the rest of his face. It was all a dead black, too, unaccompanied by that lustre which, by surface reflection, relieves the shadow upon commonplace African faces. And nobody knew all this better than Phil did. “Phil ain’t none o’ yer coffee-colored niggas,” he would say in moments of exultation, when his mood was to straighten his broad shoulders and boast a little. “Phil ain’t none o’ yer coffee-colored niggas, ner none o’ yer _alapacker_ niggas, nuther. Ise black, I is. Dat’s sho’. Ain’t got no bacon-rind shine in _my_ skin; but I jes’ tell yer what, mastah, Phil kin jes’ take the very shut offen dem shiny niggas an’ hoff an’ hoff niggas, when’t comes to de wuk. Drive? Kin I? Kin Phil drive? What yer mean, mastah, by axin’ such a question?” Nobody had asked Phil such a question; but Phil had some remarks that he wanted to make on the subject of his accomplishments in this respect, and was disposed to answer what he wished somebody would ask. “Drive? Co’se I kin. Der never was a hoss ner mule yit whatever had a mouf an’ two laigs dat Phil can’t han’le, an’ yer better b’lieve, mastah, Phil can plaunt de wheel ’twix’ de acorn an’ de shell.” If I report Phil’s boastings, it is only because they constitute too large a proportion of what he said to be omitted. I do so to confirm, not to gainsay them, or to hold their author up to ridicule. He was my friend, the faithfulest one I ever knew, and now he is dead. If he boasted now and then, no one could have had a better right. His was the pride of performance, and not the vanity of pretension.