During our last night's march, my brigade having the advance, and I being at its rear, Grierson ordered me to prevent the pushing ahead of the stragglers of the other brigades, who were to be recognized, he reminded me, by their wearing hats (mine wore caps). The order was peremptory, and was to be enforced even at the cost of cutting the offenders down. Grierson's adjutant was at my side; we were all sleeping more or less of the time, but constantly some hatted straggler was detected pushing toward the front, and ordered back,--the adjutant being especially sharp-eyed in detecting the mutilated sugar-loaves through the gloom. Finally, close to my right and pushing slowly to the front, in a long-strided walk, came a gray horse with a hatted rider,--an india-rubber poncho covering his uniform. I ordered him back; the adjutant, eager for the enforcement of the order, remonstrated at the man's disobedience; I ordered again, but without result; the adjutant ejaculated, "Damn him, cut him down!" I drew my sabre and laid its flat in one long, stinging welt across that black poncho: "----! who are you hitting?" Then we both remembered that Grierson too wore a hat; and I tender him here my public acknowledgment of a good-nature so great that an evening reunion in Memphis over a dozen of wine won his generous silence. One might go on with interminable gossip over incidents of camp and field for which at this late day only scant interest is felt; but nothing that I could say more would probably aid my purpose, which has been simply by a trifling sketch to recall the jollity, the comfort, the suffering, and the misery of campaign life, and to show how in the field more than anywhere else one learns to cherish and to depend upon a faithful and honest and willing comrade like my royal old Max. HOW I GOT MY OVERCOAT. (CIRCUMSTANTIALLY TRUE.) The war was not quite over, but my regiment was old enough to have grown too small for a colonel, and I sat, the dismalest of all men, a "mustered-out" officer, sated with such good things as a suddenly arrested income had allowed me, over an after-dinner table in a little room at the Athenæum Club. My coffee was gone to its dregs; the closing day was shutting down gloomily in such a weary rain as only a New York back-yard ever knows; and I was wondering what was to become of a man whom four years of cavalry service had estranged from every good and useful thing in life. The only career that then seemed worth running was run out for me; and, worst of all, my pay had been finally stopped.