thetic meetings and arrange for those carloads and trainloads of supplies which generous-hearted people are always so quick to hurry to neighbors in distress, Edgewater had had one meal and knew that it would not miss another—knew also where it would sleep that night—on army beds with army mattresses and under army blankets.
There sprang up an instant feeling of gratitude for all this splendid succor and a marveling that it should have come so soon. Now, that it could come at all was due to the tolerable proximity of a vast army camp with its warehouses comfortably filled with supplies and its many thousand men available for this happy service of relief, which soldiers would much rather render than fight. But the red tape? Whose sharp shears had cut it so quickly? That answer was easy—a major-general. But what had so moved the major-general? That answer would have been more difficult for the people of Edgewater to comprehend. It was the bedraggled, scarce-noticed figure in the citizen's clothes—he it was and something in the past of him of which his townsmen were but faintly cognizant.
Nevertheless these stricken people speculated upon the fact. Some person or persons had rendered a tremendous service. Who was it? Talk of it ran from tent to tent. One thing became clear. Whoever brought the army, the army had brought the relief, and by one o'clock in the afternoon, a self-appointed delegation of three citizens of Edgewater was making its way to a largish oblong tent at the corner of Whitman Avenue and Tenth Street, in the very heart of the burned residential district. Before this
