"Maybe enlisting in the home-guard will prove a wise step for the first one."
"Home-guard?" and Rob looked a bit perplexed.
"Yes. We all do considerable soldiering in our lives unconsciously; and if it comes hard to obey our captains here, I am not sure that we should always find it so easy out on the field. There are some things that take more courage than to march down to the valley of death as did the 'Six Hundred.'"
"O," said Rob, fired again with a boy's enthusiasm, "that's just the grandest thing that ever was written! I don't like poetry as a general thing, it always sounds so girlish to me; but Marco Bozzaris and that are so fine, especially the lines,—
'Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die.'"
"After all, dying is not the grandest thing," said Aunt Ruth, quietly; "and the detached instances of heroism in one's life have not always required the most courage."
"No, indeed," answered Mr. Meredith, warmly. "I know men who have acquitted themselves bravely under fire, who at home possessed so small an amount of moral courage that they really could not resist temptations which were to their mental and physical detriment."
"But it is the fighting that interests me," said Robert.