and consider the life of man, its beautiful inconsequence. It is as good a place as any other, this sub-portican retreat in the midnight pause of bellowing war. It serves me and the time. Have I not lived? Have I not slept in fine linen and stridden a horse, and looked into eyes that smiled for me, and had a bullet hole through my hat, and bowed from a platform to a sea of faces? And were they any better, intrinsically, than this? Why, then, my mud-encased and mud-protected soldiery, my Michigan pirate, my monastery-bred visionary and scholastic adventurer, both of the latter now floating on the edge of the downward-and-gone, my poet of catalogues and statistics in defiant metre, preacher of the gospel of muscular affection, now practising that gospel--we are all, I conclude, doing very well where we are. Human adaptability! Or is it in some measure a fluid type peculiar to this continent? "Enters here one with shoulder-straps and an ill-conditioned face, which he pokes in and inquires curiously, 'Why I am burning up a house full of patients?' In reply, 'If I were burning up a house, without doubt there would be reasons. But I distinguish, I am not burning up a house, but lighting a torch of intelligence for a public in the dark. Remarking, 'Oh! You're smoking up through the floor of the porch. Look out!' he withdraws. "Which reminds me to go up the river to-morrow and find the end of a telegraph wire that is approachable and unabsorbed by the military. "A singular convocation of atoms is this same war, wherein atomic egoism is at times the more violently asserted, and again disturbed and modified. The semi-translucent but resisting barrier that separates the human atom from the human atom is assaulted and impinged against almost to penetration or shattering. In this upheaval atoms tend back to inorganic unity. The roots of existence are exposed, the primeval reappears. Nevertheless I have not seemed anywhere more 'an individual and an egoist,' to quote the problematical musician, than now, sheltered here from the sombre rain, burning another man's green lattice-work for private comfort, and possessed of an occurrent idea or desire, if it were possible, to inquire of this Windham how fares his individual egoism, and whether the adventure apparently before him is, in his opinion, one worthy of a sportsman.