One evening the whole returning crew caught me at the job. The men stood still, and having watched a descent, they examined the bark piled high at the roadside, and then walked on, commenting among themselves. That night in Camp several of them spoke to me, calling me "Major" after Fitz-Adams's manner. It was the beginning of more personal acquaintance with the men. I can but like them. In the fortnight and more of my stay I cannot lay claim to having got on intimate terms with them. But they seem to me a truthful, high-spirited, hard-working, generous set of men. They swear like fiends incarnate, and when they can, they drink, and they all have "rogued and ranged in their time." On grounds of high morality there is no possible justification for them. But these are men who were born and bred to vicious living; and the wonder is not that they are bad, but that in all their blasting departure from the good, there yet survives in them the vital power of return. There is Old Man Toler. He is certainly an exception in point of birth and earliest breeding, but he has been in the lumber business more or less, he tells me, since he was a boy of fourteen. There was one important period taken out, when, as a young man, he enlisted, and served in the Army of the Potomac, from the spring of 1862 until the end of the Civil War. He is native-born, and has the intelligent patriotism of a true American. In our walks together to and from our work, I delighted in his talk about the war period in his life. His perspective as a private soldier was so true, so thoroughly free from the towering obtrusion of his own experiences. These were almost lost in his absorbing interest in the working out of great events. He knew the war thoroughly from the point of view of the army. He knew the service, and had borne his part in hardship and in action with a distinct sense of personal responsibility to the subject and aim of it all. This was luminous in what he said, and never from his declaration of it, but in the absence of such declaration, and in the loss of self in the large action of which he felt himself a part. There was much in Toler that rang true, and I regretted the more that he evidently preferred to talk little about himself, and almost never of his personal views. My wonder at his being a common hand in camp grew, until one day, in talking with Black Bob, I learned a reason. Black Bob, quite of his own accord, had instituted a series of comparisons among the men.