"I'm all over that now, and for good and all. I want to study, and as I cannot study and keep on thinking of the war all the time, why I just stop thinking about the war as well as I can."
"Well," said I, "I cannot. Look at our school: why, there are scarcely any large boys left in it any more, only little fellows and the girls. For my part, I ought to get at something else."
"What would you get at? You would feel the same anywhere else. There is Ike Zellers, the blacksmith, for example. When I came past his shop this morning on my way to school, instead of being busy with hammer and tongs as he should have been, there he was, sitting on an old harrow outside his shop-door whittling a stick, while Elias Foust was reading an account of the last battle from some newspaper. I shouldn't wonder if Elias and Ike both would be enlisting some one of these days. It is the same everywhere. All people feel the excitement of the war—storekeepers, tradesmen, farmers, and even the women; and we school-boys are no exception."
"Would you enlist, Andy, if your father would consent? You are old enough."
"I don't think I should, Harry. I want to stick to study. But there is no telling what a person may do when he is once taken down with this war-fever. But you are too young to enlist; they wouldn't take you. And you had therefore better make up your mind to stick to school and help me at my Cæsar. If you want war, there's enough of it in old Julius here to satisfy the most bloodthirsty, I should think."
"You will find more about war, and of a more romantic kind too, in Virgil and Homer when you get on so far in your studies, Andy. But the wars of Cæsar and the siege of Troy, what are they when compared with the great war now being waged in our own time and country? The nodding plumes of Hector and the shining armor of all old Homer's heroes do not seem to me half so interesting or magnificent as the brave uniforms in which some of our older school-fellows occasionally come home on furlough."
"Up there on the hillside," said Andy, suddenly rising from his reclining posture, "is cousin Joe Gutelius, hoeing corn in his father's lot. Let's go up and see what he has to say about the war."
We found Joe busy and hard at work with the young corn. He was a fine young fellow, perhaps twenty-two or twenty-three years of age, tall, well built, of a fine manly bearing, and looked a likely subject for a recruiting-officer, as, in response to our loud "Hello, Joe!" he left his unfinished row and came down to the fence for a talk.
"Rather a warm day for work in a cornfield, isn't it, Joe?"
"Well, yes," said Joe, as he threw down his hoe and mounted the top rail, wiping away the perspiration, which stood in great beads on his brow. "But I believe I'd rather hoe corn than go to school such beautiful weather. Nearly kill me to be penned up in the old Academy such a day as this."