He could not raise his hands; to raise his eyelids was a dragging effort, sad and slow. It was night. The air was damp and cold. They were carrying him on a stretcher. Their steps sounded on the pontoon bridge. The water rippled below, or else it was the rain beating on the tent, murmuring, murmuring. Helen was saying "You _must_ stay," and held his wrist, and he said, "I never saw anything make up its mind the way you do," so that they both laughed, and the pit echoed like a bass drum which made them laugh more, and then echoed with infinite thrilling moans which frightened them. And he whispered in the darkness, "It's fun we're in the same pit," and she whispered back, "Yes, gorgeous." * * * * * "It fills me with benignant admiration"--so reads one of Mavering's articles, dated "This 21st of December, one mile, possibly two--Heaven help us and call it three--from the Rappahannock," and entitled "Illustrated Speculations"--"It fills me with benignant admiration, this human adaptability. I have seen to-day the troops returning from what they called, with apparent justice, 'The Mud March,' a futile procession, with no other result than mud. For all night had the wind howled, the rain smitten them compositely with sleet and snow; they had splashed since dawn in profound mud, and are now partially dried and partially comfortable in ingenious ways, but in the main still wearing mud, finding themselves adaptable to mud, arguing that mud adds a certain density to clothing, a casing and protection to the features against the atmospheric and social hostility of Virginia. I have seen the author of _Leaves of Grass_ in a brigade hospital camp, holding the hand of a bearded, piratical-looking stranger from Michigan, who will die to-night and without doubt adapt himself to whatever shall be his lot. But this poet and tilter at conventions--what convention he is tilting at now seems obscure, what poetry he meditates with lines of ungainly sprawl. I merely record that he sits in a brigade hospital tent, holding the hand, hour after hour, of one whom he knows not from mythical Adam, proving himself, I infer, in his own way adaptable. I have seen one Captain Windham, of the 3d Regiment, ----, a man known to me these half-dozen years, a suggestive person with a problematical mind, musician and scout, bred in a monastery, and tending speculatively God knows where, but likely, from his looks, to be presently disembodied and 'blown with restless violence about the pendent world,' a condition to which, I believe profoundly, he will readily adapt himself. He lies pumped empty of blood, and with a shell wound more or less terrific, in the tent where sits the author of _Leaves of Grass_. The rain beats slowly on the tent. I see the dim shining thereof, and of other tents around it, lantern-lit. Under the high floor of a house-porch I feed a fire surreptitiously with the lattice-work, and look out into the night,