CHAPTER XIV.
MATTERS IN ROCKLAND.
With quivering lip Mr. Mather told the members of Company R that their lieutenant was dead; and strong men as they were they did not deem themselves unmanly that they wiped the big tears away, and crowding around their informer anxiously asked for particulars of their departed comrade, all speaking kindly of him, and each thinking of the sweet girl-wife at home on whom the news would fall so crushingly. A soldier’s dying was no novel thing in Washington, and so, aside from Company R, there were few who knew or cared that another soul had gone to the God who gave it,—that another victim was added to the list which shall one day come up with fearful blackness before the provokers of the war. The drums beat just the same,—the bands played just as merrily, a
