"No, but I have seen a good deal of punch in that neighborhood."
"I'll warrant it—more punch than patriotism. A great state of affairs this. There are too many of these half-hearted Head-quarters in the army. They ought to be cleaned out, and I believe that before this campaign is through it will be done. If it is not done, the country is lost."
"Country lost! why of course; that is almost admitted about that establishment. They say we may be able to pen them up, and as they don't say any more they must think that is about all. I heard a young officer—a Regular—who seems to be intimate up there say: that there was no use of talking—that men that fought the way the Southerners—he didn't use the word Rebels—did, could not be conquered,—that
they were too much for our men, etc., etc. I could have kicked the shoulder-strapped coward or traitor, may be both, but if I had, old Pigeon-hole would have had a military execution for the benefit of the Volunteers in short order. And then he strutted, talking treason and squirting tobacco juice—and all the while our Government supporting the scoundrel. West Point was on his outside, but his conversation and vacant look told me plainly enough that outside of a Government position the squirt had not brains enough to gain a day's subsistence. But he's one of Pigey's 'my Regulars,' and to us Volunteers he can put himself on his dignity with a 'Procul, Procul, este Profani.'"
"George, don't stir me up on that subject any more. I get half mad when I think that Uncle Sam's worst enemies are those of his own household. We had better anticipate the Captain's order about this in our preparations, and not be up half the night."
"Even so, Tom."
George was correct; as to a move at least, for early dawn saw the Division and a detachment from another Division, en route to the river. There was the usual quiet in the camps along which they passed, showing that George was mistaken as to the move being general. The troops marching through a winding and wooded defile, passed the deservedly well known Brigade of General Meagher. "Here's Ould Ireland Boys," said the little Irish Corporal, pointing, as his face glowed with pride, to the flag adorned with "The Harp of Ould Ireland, and the Shamrock so green," the emblems of the Emerald Isle.
"Their General is an Irishman thrue to the sod, none of your rinegade spalpeens like John Mitchel—fighting for slave-holders in Ameriky, and against the
Lords and Dukes in Ould Ireland, and the slave-holders as Father Mahan tould me the worst of the two, more aristocratic, big-feeling, and tyrannical than the English nobility. He said, too, that the blackguard could never visit the ould sod again unless he landed in the night-time, and hid himself by day in a bog up to his eyes, and even then the Father said he believed the blissed mimory of St. Patrick,
'Who drove the Frogs into the Bogs,
And banished all the Varmint,'