"Yes, up and down the line. Ashby's command is rather active."
"By George! I wish I were returning with you! When you've reported I'll look after you if you'll allow me. Pleasant enough mess.—Major Hertz, whom I knew in Prussia, Captain Wingate of your old army and one or two others."
"I'm exceedingly obliged," said McNeill, "but I have ridden hard of late, and slept little, and I should prove dull company. Moreover there's a good priest in Frederick who is a friend of a friend of mine. I have a message for him, and if General Banks permits, I shall sleep soundly and quietly at his house to-night."
"Very good," said Marchmont. "You'll get a better night there, though I'm sorry not to have you with us.—There are the lights of Frederick, and here's the picket. You have your pass from Williamsport?"
McNeill gave it to a blue soldier, who called a corporal, who read it by a swinging lantern. "Very good. Pass, Lieutenant McNeill."
The two rode on. To left and right were lighted streets of tents, varied here and there by substantial cabins. Commissary quarters appeared, sutlers' shops, booths, places of entertainment, guardhouses, a chapel. Soldiers were everywhere, dimly seen within the tents where the door flap was fastened back, plain to view about the camp-fires in open places, clustering like bees in the small squares from which ran the camp streets, thronging the trodden places before the sutlers, everywhere apparent in the foreground and divined in the distance. From somewhere came the strains of "Yankee Doodle." A gust of wind blew out the folds of the stars and stripes, fastened above some regimental headquarters. The city of tents and of frame structures hasty and crude, of fires in open places, of sutlers' shops and cantines, and booths of strolling players, of chapels and hospitals, of fluttering flags and wandering music, of restless blue soldiers, oscillating like motes in some searchlight of the giants, persisted for a long distance. At last it died away; there came a quiet field or two, then the old Maryland town of Frederick.