Looking back upon this and similar incidents of our earlier service, I often wonder how Joe kept his chevrons at all. But when the stress of hard service came and we entered the toil and hardship of the march through the enemy's country, Joe's real quality began to make itself felt too strongly, both by men and officers, to make it worth while, or indeed safe, to notice his little irregularities; for whoever else lagged or straggled it was never Joe; no matter how dangerous or disagreeable the picket or fatigue duty he was never the one to shirk or complain. The officers found that for real service here was one man absolutely dependable; the men were braced by his cheerful example, and they discovered moreover that Joe was a good one to go to in trouble. Had an improvident comrade devoured his three days' rations prematurely? Joe was always ready to divide his own remaining hard-tack. Was some extra load to be carried,--an axe, for instance?--he would cheerfully add it to his own. A sort of admiration for Joe began to appear, yet with reservations. For one thing there was no telling who would be the next victim of one of his pranks. Bill B---- remembers to this day how his supper was spoiled one evening by Joe's ghastly speculation about the method of the fattening of our pork. And I remember a night on the picket reserve when a circle of men lay asleep with their feet toward the embers of a dying fire, and Joe, ever-wakeful, quietly stealing out of the group, gathered a mighty armful of dry brush, gently deposited it upon the coals, and as the blaze mounted and the heat grew fierce, amused himself with the contortions of the roasted-out sleepers and with their drowsy profanity as they gradually awoke. He never swore himself, but I suspected at times that he took a sinful delight in the ingeniously blasphemous explosions of some of his comrades. Then too, his ways were original. He had a genius for cookery, and the messes he concocted from meagre and sometimes unfamiliar materials were the wonder, and often the horror of his unsophisticated and conservative comrades; yet he was strangely fastidious withal. When a too greedy or too careless commissariat sent us boxes of ancient hard-tack, mementoes of last year's campaign, marked "White House" or "Harrison's Landing," whose mouldy contents were living exponents of the doctrine of evolution, Joe would not eat a single cracker without careful dissection and removal of every inhabitant, though we were near starving. And though careless of outward appearances, he was rigid in certain personal habits. So the men thought when they saw how, even in the dead of winter, he would have his frequent bath, even if he had to break the ice in some pond or stream for it.