of inclination, preferred to patronize the camp barber. This personage plied his vocation inside the tent in cold or stormy weather, but at other times took his post in rear of the tent, where he had improvised a chair for the comfort (?) of his victims. This chair was a product of home manufacture. Its framework was four stakes driven into the ground, two long ones for the back legs, and two shorter ones for the front. On this foundation a superstructure was raised which made a passable barber's chair. But not all the professors who presided at these chairs were finished tonsors, and the back of a soldier's head whose hair had been "shingled" by one of them was likely to show each course of the shingles with painful distinctness. The razors, too, were of the most barbarous sort, like the "trust razor" of the old song with which the Irishman got his "Love o' God Shave."

One other occupation of a few men in every camp, which I must not overlook, was that of studying the tactics. Some were doing it, perhaps, under the instructions of superior officers; some because of an ambition to deserve promotion. Some were looking to passing a competitive examination with a view of obtaining a furlough; and so these men, from various motives, were "booking" themselves. But the great mass of the rank and file had too much to do with the practice of war to take much interest in working out its theory, and freely gave themselves up, when off duty, to every available variety of physical or mental recreation, doing their uttermost to pass away the time rapidly; and even those troops having nearly three years to serve would exclaim, with a cheerfulness more feigned than real, as each day dragged to its close, "It's only two years and a but."

CHAPTER VI.

JONAHS AND BEATS.

"Good people, I'll sing you a ditty,
So bear with me all ye who can;
I make an appeal to your pity,
For I'm a most unlucky man.
'Twas under an unlucky planet
That I a poor mortal was born;

My existence since first I began it

Has been very sad and forlorn.

Then do not make sport of my troubles,

But pity me all ye who can,

For I'm an uncomfortable, horrible, terrible, inconsolable, unlucky man."

OLD SONG.

Na former chapter I made the statement that Sibley tents furnished quarters capacious enough for twelve men. That statement is to be taken with some qualifications. If those men were all lying down asleep, there did not seem much of a crowd. But if one man of the twelve happened to be on guard at night, and, furthermore, was on what we used to know as the Third Relief guard, which in my company was posted at 12, midnight, and came off post at 2 A.M., when all were soundly sleeping, and, moreover, if this man chanced to quarter in that part of the tent opposite the entrance, and if, in seeking his blanket and board in the darkness, it was his luck to step on the stockinged foot of a recumbent form having a large voice, a large temper, but a small though forcible selection of English defiled, straightway that selection was hurled at the head of the offending even though well-meaning guard. And if,

under the excitement of his mishap, the luckless guard makes a spring thinking to clear all other intervening slumberers and score a home run, but alights instead amidships of the comrade who sleeps next him, expelling from him a groan that by all known comparisons should have been his last, the poor guard has only involved himself the more inextricably in trouble; for as soon as his latest victim recovers consciousness sufficiently to know that it was not a twelvepound cannon ball that has doubled him up, and that stretcher bearers are not needed to take him to the rear, he strikes up in the same strain and pitch and force as that of the first victim, and together they make the midnight air vocal with choice invective against their representative of the Third Relief. By this time the rest of the tent's crew have been waked up, cross enough, too, at being thus rudely disturbed, and they all come in heavily on the chorus. As the wordy assault continues the inmates of adjoining tents who have also been aroused take a hand in it, and "Shut up!"-"Sergeant of the Guard!""Go lie down!"-"Shoot him on the spot!"-" Put him in the guard-house!" are a few of the many impromptu orders issued within and without the tent in question.

At last the tempest in a teapot expends itself and by the time that the sergeant of the guard has arrived to seek out the cause of the tumult and enforce the instructions of the officer of the day by putting the offenders against the rules and discipline of camp under arrest, for talking and disturbance after Taps, all are quiet, for no one would make a complaint against the culprits. Their temporary excitement has cooled, and the discreet sergeant is even in doubt as to which tent contains the offenders.

Now, accidents will happen to the most careful and the best of men, but the soldier whom I have been describing could be found in every squad in camp that is, a man of his kind. Such men were called "Jonahs " on account of their ill luck. Perhaps this particular Jonah after getting

his tin plate level full of hot pea-soup was sure, on entering the tent, to spill a part of it down somebody's back. The higher he could hold it the better it seemed to please him as The made his way to his accustomed place in the tent, and in bringing it down into a latitude where he proposed to eat it

he usually managed to dispose of much of the remainder, either on his own or somebody else's blankets. When peasoup failed him for a diversion, he was a dead shot on kicking over his neighbor's pot of coffee, which the owner had put down for a moment while he adjusted his lap-table to receive his supper. The profuseness of the Jonah's apologies and they always were profuse, and undoubtedly sincere was utterly inadequate as a balm for the wounds. he made. Anybody else in the tent might have kicked the coffee to the remotest bounds of camp with malice aforethought, and it would not have produced a tithe of the aggravation which it did to have this constitutional blunderer do it by accident. It may be that he wished to borrow

your ink. Of course you could not refuse him. It may have been made by you with some ink powders sent from home-perhaps the last you had and which you should want yourself that very day. It mattered not. He took it with complacency and fair promises, put it on a box by his side and tipped the box over five minutes afterward by the watch.

Cooking was the forte of this Jonah. He could be found most any time of day or night, if he was a guardsman around the camp-fire with his little mess of something in his tomato can or tin dipper, which he would throw an air of

mystery around every now and then by drawing a small package from the depths of his pocket or haversack and scattering some of its contents into the brew. But there was a time in the history of his culinary pursuits when he rose to a supreme height as a blunderer. It was when he appeared at the camp-fire which, by the way, he never kindled himself, ready to occupy the choice places with his dishes; and after the two rails, between which fires were usually built, had been well burdened by the coffee-pots of his comrades it presented an opportunity which his evil genius was likely to take advantage of; for then he was suddenly seized with a thought of something else that he had forgotten to borrow. Turning in his haste to go to the