The other monument, in its simple uprightness, seemed a fit memorial for a knightly soul. Noble Harry B----! We who knew him said to ourselves, How can the world spare such as he! But the legend on the marble told how he met his death while in command of a battery in Sheridan's great fight at Cedar Creek. I wandered on till I came to an humble stone whose rudely pathetic inscription, telling how it was "erected to his memory by his wife," touched me deeply. Bluff, hearty Henry H---- was one of my own company who fell on the bloody field of Salem Heights. Just a plain man, only a private, no conspicuous hero, yet one of those faithfully courageous souls who, when thick-flying bullets are droning their deadly song, and the scorching breath of battle tries the line, never give captain or file-closers a moment's anxiety. You could always depend upon "Hank" to stand like a rock with his face to the foe, and to waste no shots on empty air. And one reason for the Homeric deadliness of our war was that both in the brown-clad ranks of the Southrons and among the blue-coated Men of the North there were thousands like him. I turned from the place in pensive mood. Remembering the awful harvest of great battle-fields I said to myself: Only a small fraction of it is planted in such peaceful places as this, yet this is a fair example of its lesson. Every village graveyard throughout our broad land tells the same story. Death waited with grim confidence for the choice spirits in that war, and the best of us who took our share in it are not those who live to tell its story. Then thought travelled afar to the banks of the Rappahannock and its camps and battle-fields. I dreamed that once more I stood amid the familiar, blue-clad throng, yet there was a difference. Past and present seemed to mingle. Here and there a face would vanish or a well-remembered voice fail, grow faint and far off, or suddenly become silent, and among these one, the first sought for, the most desired, the face and voice of my tent-mate. I awoke from my dream, remembering that he, too, now belongs to the army of the nobly fallen. But ours was no common friendship. We had been schoolmates before we became comrades, then tent-mates, finally brothers like David and Jonathan. We slept under one blanket; we shared our rations and our confidences; and if we did not fight side by side, that was in part because he was corporal at the right of the first platoon and my place was at the other end of the line, but also in part because he had a way of doing such startlingly original things in the face of danger. His image rises before me now. There he stands, tall, erect, balanced on one foot while he nervously taps the ground with the other and looks at me with that mocking expression all his own, that premonitory grin provoked by some latent jest upon my moralising.