Mr. Taylor told me he was seventy-three years old, and I said, "My! I'd never guessed it, you look younger than that"; and he said, "Yes, boy, I'm stepping along."
Then he told me when he was a boy he worked on one of the canal boats, and at that time there were many more boats, for most of the freight, that goes in freight trains now on railroads, came down the canal in boats. After that he enlisted in the army and went away out West. He told me when he was young the West was the West, and you could shoot buffaloes. He knows because he shot them. Then when the Civil War broke out, he stayed in the army, enlisted again and fought all through it, and came home with a bullet in his leg.
His father was a cooper and built the stone house Mr. Taylor lives in for a cooper shop, and that was why it was built so solid and had such thick walls. He took me into the cellar and showed it to me, for that was where they set the iron hoops to cool. I asked him who lived with him in it, and he said he was all alone, everybody was gone, he said, but him. I told him about my father and mother then, and how I would be all alone if it wasn't for Uncle Burt, and he said Uncle Burt was a fine man and a good soldier.
He said he was glad I lived next door. I told him I was glad, too. He asked me if I went in for any kind of sport like shooting; and I said, not yet, but I climbed trees, and he said, when his cherries were ripe, if I didn't make myself sick on Aunty Edith's, I could climb his, when he was around.
Then I asked him if he would tell me a story about the Civil War, and he laughed and said the most of them were too full of fighting and sad things for a little boy like me; and I told him I didn't mind them being a little bloody; that I wasn't a kindergarten baby.
He laughed some more, and said: "Speaking of climbing trees makes me think of how near I was to being captured by some rebels once. You know, boy, Quakers is agin all fighting, so at the beginning of the war, when we regulars was sent to drill with a lot of new men and knock them into shape, I was some surprised when fust thing I seen was young Jim Wilton, whose father I knowed to be a Quaker living on the corner of the same street where my uncle lived in Phillydelphy.
"I says to him, 'Hullo, Jim, what you doing here?' and he said, 'Well, Tom, I come here to larn you how to fight.' 'And you a Quaker's son,' says I. 'Yup,' he says, 'and thee knows that my old folks is none too pleased; but somehow I couldn't stay home comfortable with all the other boys fighting to free the blacks, so here I be.'
"Well, I was right glad to see him, and get news of all the old neighbors, and Jim and me gits very chummy; and when there's a piece of business needing the attention of one of us, it usually gits the attention of both. Me and him hunting in couples as it were.
"That's how it come about that one time, there being a bit of spying to be done, me and Jim finds ourselves in rebel uniforms, waiting and listening beside a camp-fire outside the rebel Gineral's tent, using our ears and our eyes too. When up rides Gineral Stuart, who used to be my commanding officer in the old days before he turnt reb, when he was in the regular army.