"Very pretty," said the colonel, "very pretty, indeed. Quite up to our standard, eh, Jack? Guard looks small, though,—doesn't it?—to one who's used to seeing twenty-four files paraded." The colonel and I had got leave for a couple of weeks to run down to Old Point to see the heavy gun practice, and now we stood watching the new guard as it marched away to relieve the old details.
Yes, it was pretty, all of it,—very pretty indeed,—and I felt repaid for the early breakfast we had taken in order to get over to the fort in time for the ceremony. The surroundings made a fitting frame for the picture: before us lay the broad, green floor of the level parade, its carpet of short-cropped turf still glistening with the morning dew; the angular lines of the great, ungainly barracks somehow looked less harsh in the warm sunshine; and the officers' quarters, half hidden beneath the scrubby oaks and overhanging willows, looked cosey and comfortable—and almost too homelike for such a place.
While the gray, sod-capped walls of the old fort still were ringing with the quickstep played by the four smart trumpeters who led the guard in its march, we turned and left the parade, loitering for a moment at the place where the old guns—relics of Yorktown, Saratoga, and many another by-gone siege and battle—lie sullen and dumb, while the green mould of long years gathers ever more thickly upon cascabel, chase, and trunnion. "Back numbers," said the colonel, half to himself, as he stooped to read the inscription deeply graven in the metal of an old field-piece, "back numbers, all of them. 'Captured at Yorktown'—and that was more than a hundred years ago! Well, those who won and those who lost are under ground now, and the old gun's dead, too. It has said its last word."
We sauntered away, through the echoing archway, and across the drawbridge which spans the green and quiet water of the wide ditch; and as we slowly walked past the water battery, with its long row of grim, black Rodmans frowning out upon the bay—each in its vaulted casemate—like so many kennelled watch-dogs, the colonel broke the silence with, "Do you know, Jack, I don't care particularly about watching the firing to-day? The pounding we got yesterday was infernal. I hope this country can steer clear of war until we've perfected the pneumatic gun."
"Well, I don't know," said I. "Wouldn't that seem too much like fighting with bean-blowers?"
"It wouldn't much resemble the fighting in the old days—and that's a fact," replied the colonel, kicking into the ditch a pebble from the gravelled roadway, and smiling at the sudden scattering of a school of little fish, caused by the unexpected splash. "I'm not so sure, after all, that I'm in a hurry for the time to arrive when some fellow, ten miles or so away, can free a lot of compressed air, and by means of it drop half a barrel of dynamite in my vicinity—without even so much as a puff of smoke to show which way I ought to turn to bow my acknowledgments. I've an idea, old man, that a little occurrence of that sort would scatter even the gallant Third about as completely and expeditiously as my pebble disorganized those minnows."
A few steps more brought us beyond the last of the curving line of casemates, and as we turned towards the hotel the colonel said, "I feel that I'm growing old, for now-a-days even a little heavy gun firing makes my ears ache, and anything over a little bores me. Thirty years ago I didn't mind it so much as I do now. Thirty years ago? Why, Jack, I can't realize it! But it must be that: yes, '61 from '91; that makes it—and it makes me an old man, too."
"Nonsense!" said I, laughing, for in all the Third there is no younger-hearted man than the colonel who commands it. "It makes you nothing of the sort. In '61 you were nineteen; add thirty to that—and it leaves you still on the sunny side of fifty. See here, Colonel; on our rolls we have seven hundred men, and some few over—how many are there among them who could down you to-day?"
"Not many, if I do say it," replied the colonel, with his usual modesty, drawing himself up and stretching out one long arm, to gaze contemplatively at the sinewy wrist and compact bunch of knuckles with which it terminated. "But all that only goes to show how well preserved I am, for I am an old man, in spite of what you say. Confound you, Jack! Can't you let a veteran have the satisfaction of feeling venerable and antique?"