As the day ended the moist wind gathered strength and sang in his ears as he crept forward--now sleeping, now waking, for a time filled with warm memories of his college life, and again fighting over the last hopeless campaign from the Wilderness to the trenches where Petersburg had fallen. They had yielded step by step, but the great hunter had pressed on, and now the thin brigades were gathering for the last stand together. Overhead he heard the soughing of the pines, and around him the steady tramp of feet too tired to lift themselves from out the heavy mud. Straight above in the muffled sky a star shone dimly, and for a time he watched it in his effort to keep awake. Then he began on the raw corn in his pocket, shelling it from the cob as he walked along; but when the taste of blood rose to his lips, he put the ear away again, and stooped to rub his eyes with a handful of damp earth. Then, at last, in sheer desperation, he loosened the grip upon his thoughts, and stumbled on, between waking and sleeping, into the darkness that lay ahead. In the road before him the door at Chericoke opened wide as on the old Christmas Eves, and he saw the Major and the Governor draining their glasses under the garlands of mistletoe and holly, while Betty and Virginia, in dresses of white tarleton, stood against the ruddy glow that filled the panelled parlour. The cheerful Christmas smell was in the air--the smell of apple toddy, of roasted turkey, of plum pudding in a blaze of alcohol. As he entered after his long ride from college, Betty came up to him and slipped a warm white hand into his cold one, while he met the hazel beams from beneath her lashes. “I hope you have brought Jack Morson,” she said. “Virginia is waiting. See how lovely she looks in her white flounces, with the string of coral about her neck.” “But the war, Betty?” he asked, with blinking eyes, and as he put out his hand to touch the pearls upon her bosom, he saw that it was whole again--no wound was there, only the snowflakes that fell from his sleeve upon her breast. “What of the war, dear? I must go back to the army.” Betty laughed long and merrily. “Why, you're dreaming, Dan,” she said. “It all comes of those wicked stories of the Major's. In a moment you will believe that this is really 1812, and you've gone without your rations.” “Thank God!” he cried aloud, and the sound of his own voice woke him, as he slipped and went down in a mudhole upon the road. The Christmas smell faded from his nostrils; in its place came the smoke from Pinetop's pipe--a faithful friend until the last. Overhead the star was still shining, and to the front he heard a single shot from the hovering cavalry, withdrawing for the night. “God damn this mud!” called a man behind him, as he lurched sideways from the ranks. Farther away three hoarse voices, the remnant of a once famous glee club, were singing in the endeavour to scare off sleep:-- “Rally round the flag, boys, rally once again!”