"With strict attention." Mavering leaned forward, his hands on the burned turf. His feet dangled against the bank. "Distinguished consideration. You will mention that attitude, no doubt." "No doubt at all." "Good-morning, sir." "Good-morning, colonel." The troop departed with crowded thud of hoofs and scatter of sand. Mavering watched them out of sight, then slid down the bank and picked up his hat. He lifted the head of the prostrate horse, but the eyes were dull, the throat full of blood; unbuckled the bridle and slung it over his arm. The long, yellow level of the road-bed to the nearest curves was empty in both directions. He was quite alone in the desolation. He muttered and hummed in profoundest bass. "Singular game--'Plaidie to the angry airt'--recondite, astrological. Make a note of it; cavalry officers as a class are eccentric and deep. It's not my funeral. It appears to be the anchorite's. 'The brightest jewel in my crown'"--He crossed the road-bed, picked his way eastward into the woods, long-stepping, bridle on arm, gaunt and black, over the black ground among the gaunt, black stumps of the charred trees--"Wad be my queen." Chapter XV Treats of the Distribution of Tracts in the Valley of the Shenandoah. The Shenandoah goes by the eastern edge of the wide valley, murmuring its own musical name, "Shenandoah," as if it knew the word's significance in glory, tumult, and pain, but had taught all three to march to a quiet requiem; "Shenandoah"--old, unhappy, far-off things, under the lulling and palliation now of many years. Gard rode directly south, through plodding, dusty lines of haggard-eyed men, and came to it a few miles above the junction and the famous Ferry. The cannon boomed all day on his left over by the larger river. He rode by daylight and openly and none seemed to doubt him; his dress and little printed tracts were passports enough for the time. He fell into the habit, first by impulse and then by policy, of carrying a tract in his hand, using its subject and phraseology for the next conversation and entering on the subject promptly. It gave him a sense of detachment and isolation of a peculiar kind, this urging on some weary and hurrying group a doctrine of peace, compassion, and humility, as if the manner and language were working inward and growing less alien to him, and he really were a mysterious evangelist--a messenger with spiritual tidings and council. He noticed--and it seemed from its recurrence to have a certain pathos--that, after the laughter which rose around him in most cases had subsided, the faces would lose their weariness and strain, and seem to express another side of their humanity. They reminded him, then, of the fruit-seller and the policeman on the avenue, where he used to go to and from the Brotherhood of Consolation and the Church of the Trinity, who recognized in him some one apart and remote from the current of events--the river of humanity on the avenue.