THE RECOLLECTIONS
OF
A DRUMMER-BOY.
CHAPTER I.
OFF TO THE WAR.
"It is no use, Andy, I cannot study any more. I have struggled against this feeling, and have again and again resolved to shut myself up to my books and stop thinking about the war; but when news comes of one great battle after another, and I look around in the school-room and see the many vacant seats once occupied by the older boys, and think of where they are and what they may be doing away down in Dixie, I fall to day-dreaming and wool-gathering over my books, and it is just no use. I cannot study any more. I might as well leave school and go home and get at something else."
But my companion was apparently too deeply interested in unravelling the intricacies of a sentence in Cæsar to pay much attention to what I had been saying. For Andy was a studious boy, and the sentence with which he had been wrestling when the bell rang for recess could not at once be given up. He had therefore carried his book with him on our walk as we strolled leisurely up the green lane which led past the "Old Academy," and, with his copy of Cæsar spread out before him, lay stretched out at full length on the greensward, in the shade of a large cherry-tree, whose fruit was already turning red under the warm spring sun. It was a beautiful, dreamy day in May, early in the summer of 1862, the second year of the great Civil War. The air was laden with the sweet scent of the young clover, and vocal with the song of the robin and the bluebird. The sky was cloudless overhead, and the soft spring breeze blew balmily up from the south. Behind us were the hills, covered with orchards, and beneath us lay the quiet little village of M——, with its one thousand inhabitants, and beyond it the valley, renowned far and wide for its beauty, while in the farther background deep-blue mountains rose towering toward the sky.
My companion, apparently quite indifferent to the languid influence of the season, resolutely persevered at his task until he had triumphantly mastered it. Then, closing the book and clasping his hands behind his head as he rolled around on his back, he looked at me with a smile and said,—
"Oh! you only have the spring-fever, Harry."
"No, I haven't, Andy; it was the same last winter. And don't you remember how excited you were when the news came about Fort Sumter last spring? You would have enlisted right off, had your father consented. Or, may be, you had the spring-fever then?"