“No,” said Tom; “it’s impossible. My leave of absence, you see, expires in two days, so that I shall have to give up going home at all for the present. I’m afraid now that Ned won’t be well enough to satisfy me when I start for the front. He’s been perfectly delirious, and yesterday the doctor said was the turning-point. If he only is conscious when he wakes from this sleep! Do you think he has changed?”
“Changed!” said the Professor; “he’s not the same boy,—he’s not a boy at all. What a developing agent this terrible war is!”
“And now you must tell me about Harvard,” said Tom.
“Wait a minute,” said the Professor. “I have one or two questions to ask you first. I want to hear about this new rebel general who is making such havoc with us.”
“Stonewall Jackson, you mean,” said Tom. “No one knows much about him; but Ned declares that he is, thus far, the most striking figure of the rebellion. Maliff, who says he knew him when he was in command at Fort Hamilton, before the war, showed us a picture of him, in which he looked simply prim and neat. The war has probably changed all that. I think we are all a little afraid of him, and hope to meet him in battle soon. Some of the men think he is a supernatural being.”
“The Hibernian element, I suppose,” said the Professor.
“Exactly,” said Tom.
“And now tell me some more about yourselves,” continued the Professor.
“Well, about ourselves,” said Tom, “there is little to say. I am a captain, as you see; and Ned is a lieutenant-colonel, and commands our regiment,—or what there is left of it now. We might both have been promoted before this; but we were bound to stick together, and so we have, in all sorts of places too.”