This last brought a smile to the crowd, and a collection was taken up for the old man.
"Bress you, gemmen! bress you! Served my Master forty-five years and hab nuffin to show for it. Our little patch Hannar Amander got, but I tries to sarve de Lor at de same time, and dere is a better 'count kept ob dat in a place where old Master dead and gone now pas' twenty years, will nebber hab a chance ob getting at de books."
The old man had greatly won upon his hearers, when the bugle called them to their posts.
Our corps from this place took the road to White Plains, near which little village they encamped in a wood for two nights and a day, while a snow-storm whitened the fields.
"Let the hawk stoop, the bird has flown,"
said a boyish-faced officer who was known in the Regiment as the Poetical Lieutenant, to the Adjutant, as he pushed aside the canvas door of the Office Tent on one of those wintry evenings. The caller had left the studies of the Sophomoric year,—or rather his Scott, Byron, Burns, and the popular novelists of the day,—for the recruiting service in his native county. The day-dreams of the boy as to the gilded glory of the soldier had been roughly broken in upon by severe practical lessons, in tedious out-post duty and wearisome marches. He could remember, as could many others, how he had admired the noble and commanding air with which Washington stands in the bow of the well loaded boat as represented on the historic canvas, and the stern determination depicted upon the countenances of the rest of his Roman-nosed comrades—(why is it that our historic artists make all our Revolutionary Fathers Roman-nosed? If their pictures are faithful, where in the world do our swarms of pugs and aquilines come from worn by those claiming Revolutionary descent? Is it beyond their skill to make a pug or an aquiline an index to nobility of soul or heroic resolve?)—as they keep the frozen masses borne by that angry tide at safe distance from the frail bark—but he then felt nothing of the ice grating the sides of the vessel in
which he hoped to make the voyage of life, nor shuddered at the wintry midnight blast that swept down the valley of the Delaware. His dreams had departed; but poetical quotations remained for use at every opportunity.
"What's the matter now?" says the Adjutant.