"No you don't, old fellow!" cried the young girl, exercising the little restraint that was necessary. "You don't get away from me in that manner. I will stop your grumbling before I have done with you, by a remedy a little worse than the disease—plenty of my own gabble! I said literature—do you see that desk littered with papers, you ungrateful wretch?" (It will be seen that Josephine Harris had a habit of using strong Saxon words, as well as some that were "fast," not to say bordering upon popular slang; and the reader may as well be horrified with her, and get over it, first as last.) "You have sent out from that desk words that have done more good to the patriotic cause than the raising of ten regiments, and yet you have not the grace to thank God for giving you the strength to do that! You dare to lie there and call yourself useless! Out upon you—I am ashamed of you!"
"Words are not deeds!" said the young man, again moving uneasily.
"Words, when they come from the furnace of a true heart, shape themselves into deeds in others," was the reply.
"In the days of the Revolution, my ancestors did their deeds, instead of shaping them," said the invalid. "Two of them dead in the Old Sugar House and the prison ships at the Wallabout, and another crippled for life at Saratoga, bore witness that patriotism with them was no hollow pretence. And look at the present. My brother John going through battle after battle with Duryea's Zouaves, in Virginia, like a brave man and a soldier; and I lying helpless here, while my cousin Egbert has his regiment almost raised."
"Almost," said the young girl, in a tone which showed that she did not think he had quite accomplished that laudable endeavor.
"And will be going down directly," Crawford continued.
"Yes, going down, clear down, that is if he ever starts!" commented saucy Josephine.
"Yes, I remember, you do not like my cousin Egbert," said the invalid.
"I do not like humbugs anywhere!" sharply said the young girl. "Why don't you call him 'Eg.,' as you do sometimes? Then I should be tempted to make a few bad puns, and to say that in my opinion he is not a 'good egg,' but a 'hard egg,' if not a 'bad egg,' and that I hope if he ever gets among the Virginia sands he will come out a 'roast egg' or a 'cracked' one!"
"Shame, Joe, what do you mean!" said the invalid, really pained by her flippancy.