He found his saturine comrade sitting on a log by a comfortable fire, restoring buttons which, like soldiers, had become "missing by reason of exigencies of the campaign."

The temptation to believe that inanimate matter can be actuated by obstinate malice is almost irresistible when one has to do with the long skeins of black thread which the soldiers use for their sewing. These skeins resolve themselves, upon the pulling of the first thread, into bunches of entanglement more hopelessly perverse than the Gordian knot, or the snarls in a child's hair. To the inexperienced victim, desirous of securing the wherewithal to sew a button on, nothing seems easier than to pull a thread out of the bunch of loose filament that lies before him. Rash man! That simple mesh hat a baffling power like unto the Labyrinth of Arsino, and long labor of fingers and teeth aided by heated and improper language, frequently fails to extract so much as a half foot of thread.

Abe had stuck his needle down into the log beside him. Near, were the buttons he had fished out of his pocket, and he was laboring with clumsy fingers and rising temper at an obdurate bunch of thread.