I remember the shock of national loss when the President was assassinated; and, after that, the coming and going of army-faces,—some strange, some familiar. It was like Virginia once more, to hear the band march, serenading, up the quiet street; to recognize hearty voices at the garden gate; to command my most dutiful to "shoulder arms!" and "right wheel!" and, waking from slumber, to creep to the head of the stairs, and surreptitiously greet dear M. and B. and broad-shouldered A., as they passed below.
Not only these my childish fancy saw, but there seemed to gather with them many, many others, bearing names that sometime had been cited in my presence from the bright annals of Massachusetts; and out of their syllables I framed a ghostly pageant, following ever, like a breath of wind, close on the footsteps of their living peers. The dream-cohorts, too, smiled up at me, and swept by. "Trenmor came, the tall form of vanished years, his blue hosts behind him."
I went to camp several times thereafter, though never with my own brigade; but having outlived its enchantment, inasmuch as I were now conscious of "playing soldier" merely, I took a stand on my war record, and decided to withdraw from the militia. That was long ago. But the old prepossessions are immortal. The smell of powder is sweeter to me than Oriental lilies. I resent the doctrine of absorption into the restful bosom of Brahma. An it please you, I aspire to Mars.
I used to love the sight of those shabby warriors, dolefully bewailing their forlorn condition, and mildly suggesting their eligibility to a bounteous dinner, who prowled, in long succession, about our side door. I thrilled with indignation at their counterfeited wrongs. I brought them my sweetmeats, to throw a halo about their sober meal. Do I not take kindly yet to the battered coat bedizened with bright buttons, on the back of M., grimy vender of coal? Do I not encourage the handsome charges of our grocer, solely because I know his antecedents, and can trace his limp to Ball's Bluff?
It was an article of belief, in my Utopian childhood, that a soldier could do no wrong. It went hard with me, in my eleventh year, to catch a glimpse of the silver Maltese cross, the badge of the impeccable Fifth Corps, on the breast of a scowling state prisoner, the hero "shorn of his beams." His arm no longer rested on a howitzer; he wielded a crowbar. He might have hallowed Libby or Andersonville with his passing, and now,—O Absalom!
The warden, the benignant warden, himself of the "trade of war," did he know what he was doing, when he assured me that the cells were peopled with ex-Federal knights? Men have tried vainly to restore the lost completeness of the glorious statue of Melos. Even so with a broken faith. What it might have been is out of the province of diviners.
