Chapter 17

There are, whose changing lineaments
Express each guileless passion of the breast;
Where Love, and Hope, and tender-hearted Pity
Are seen reflected, as from a mirror's face;
But cold experience can veil these hues
With looks, invented shrewdly to encompass
The cunning purposes of base deceit.

--Duo.

The officer to whose keeping Dunwoodie had committed the peddler
transferred his charge to the custody of the regular sergeant of the
guard. The gift of Captain Wharton had not been lost on the youthful
lieutenant; and a certain dancing motion that had taken possession of
objects before his eyes, gave him warning of the necessity of recruiting
nature by sleep. After admonishing the noncommissioned guardian of
Harvey to omit no watchfulness in securing the prisoner, the youth
wrapped himself in his cloak, and, stretched on a bench before a fire,
soon found the repose he needed. A rude shed extended the whole length
of the rear of the building, and from off one of its ends had been
partitioned a small apartment, that was intended as a repository for
many of the lesser implements of husbandry. The lawless times had,
however, occasioned its being stripped of everything of value; and the
searching eyes of Betty Flanagan selected this spot, on her arrival, as
the storehouse for her movables and a sanctuary for her person. The
spare arms and baggage of the corps had also been deposited here; and
the united treasures were placed under the eye of the sentinel who
paraded the shed as a guardian of the rear of the headquarters. A second
soldier, who was stationed near the house to protect the horses of the
officers, could command a view of the outside of the apartment; and, as
it was without window or outlet of any kind, excepting its door, the
considerate sergeant thought this the most befitting place in which to
deposit his prisoner until the moment of his execution. Several
inducements urged Sergeant Hollister to this determination, among which
was the absence of the washerwoman, who lay before the kitchen fire,
dreaming that the corps was attacking a party of the enemy, and
mistaking the noise that proceeded from her own nose for the bugles of
the Virginians sounding the charge. Another was the peculiar opinions
that the veteran entertained of life and death, and by which he was
distinguished in the corps as a man of most exemplary piety and holiness
of life. The sergeant was more than fifty years of age, and for half
that period he had borne arms. The constant recurrence of sudden deaths
before his eyes had produced an effect on him differing greatly from
that which was the usual moral consequence of such scenes; and he had
become not only the most steady, but the most trustworthy soldier in his