The general glanced up under the brim of his slouched hat; then suddenly flung back his head, so that his big beard stood out from his chest, and said, simply: "What do you want?" "I am directed by a Session of the Brethren to distribute these." "Who are you?" "Of a congregation in Maryland." "What is your name?" "Moselle." "Who are the Brethren?" "We are called Dunkers by those not of our communion. We do not use the name." "There was a church of that sect near Sharpsburg." "It is our church." "They seemed to be German. You have no accent." "It was said to be the reason I was chosen--the speaking freely the language. It was said at the Session." "Very well." He dropped his eyes to the tract in his hand. Gard remained placid, persistent. "It was said a permission might be written." "Very well." He wrote a few words on a scrap of paper and handed it to Gard. "May I keep this tract in exchange?" "It is not exchanged. It is given." Gard turned his horse. The general looked up. "You are a young man"--silence--"But your sect takes no part in wars." Gard waited. "Do you know the subject of this tract?" "It is on the text, 'I must be about my Father's business.'" The general seemed to have in mind to say more. He looked at Gard peculiarly--not quite as the others had seemed to do, half suspecting, half recognizing an alien being, a moral and mental unknown at some withdrawn height, but as if recognizing one like himself in isolation and pilgrimage, and so understanding his bearing and capacity for silence. The horsemen behind whispered and smiled. "Very well." The general turned again to the working squads, and Gard rode away in the smoke that drifted from the fires across the track. He had a sense, too, of some flash of recognition that had gone below the part he was playing, and seemed to involve a salutation and question of other import and circumstance, a recognition of kinship in the knowledge of other realities than the feet walk upon or the eyes see; knowledge of the silence out of which one is born, of the flux of his present, of destiny in ambush, of the "stream of the flying constellations," and the steady pour of time, "inhaled as a vapor;" knowledge of the individual's own lonely issue in the midst of these. But the turning again to his working squads seemed to have been the general's solution--or, at least, conclusion. "Very well;" one must be about the business set him to do. "He must work in his garden," had been more than one sage's conclusion.