“Vastly more so,” answered the Colonel, calmly watching the loading of his crops upon the wagons in the distance. “There is, particularly in New England, a sturdy yeomanry, such as our friend here belongs to,” indicating the sergeant, “which really represents an admirable type of man.”
“Gosh,” exclaimed the sergeant, in admiration, “it’s the durndest, gamest thing I ever see, you standin’ up here as cool as a cucumber, when your property’s bein’ took. I kin stand fire; my grandfather, he fought at Lexington, and he didn’t flunk nuther, and I ain’t flunked much. But I swan, if you Johnny Rebs was a-cartin’ off my hay and stuff, I’d be a deal more excited ’n you are. And my old woman—gosh t’ almighty!”
The lanky sergeant seemed completely staggered by the contemplation of the old woman’s probable behavior upon such an occasion.
“There are other things, my friend,” answered the Colonel, putting his hands under his coat-tails and turning his back upon the barn in the distance, “which are of more consequence, I opine, than hay and corn. That, I think, the most limited intelligence will admit.”
“That’s so,” responded the lanky sergeant, “I kin do a sight better keepin’ bees up in Vermont than down here in Virginny fightin’ the rebs for eighteen dollars a month, but when Uncle Abe called for seventy-five thousand men I couldn’t a-kep’ them bees another day, not if I had been makin’ two hundred dollars a month at it. When I heard ’bout it, I kem in, and I said to the old woman: ‘I’ve got a call,’ and she screeched out, ‘A call to git converted, Silas?’—the old woman’s powerful religious,—and I says, ‘No, Sary—a call to go and fight for the Flag.’ And when we talked it over, and remembered about my grandfather,—he lived to be selectman,—the old woman says, ‘Silas, you are a miser’bul man, and you’ll git killed in your sins, and no insurance on your life, and it’ll take all I kin rake and scrape to bring your body home, but mebbe it’s your duty to fight for your country.’ And she said I might come, and here I am, and the bees is goin’ to thunder.”
“Unfortunately for me, sir,” said the Colonel, with a faint smile, but with unabated politeness. “However, I wish to say that you are pursuing your humble but unpleasant duty in a most gentlemanlike manner. For, look you, the term gentleman is comprehensive. It includes not only a man who has had the advantages of birth and station,—advantages which I may, with all modesty, claim, as enjoying them without any merit of my own,—but a man like yourself, of honorable, though humble parentage, who possesses a sturdy independence of spirit to which, I may say, my friend with the violent brogue is a stranger.”
The lanky sergeant, who had a dry, Puritanical humor of his own, was immensely tickled at this, and, at the same time, profoundly respectful of a man who could enter into disquisitions respecting what constituted a gentleman while his goods were being confiscated under his very nose.
“I tell you what,” said he, becoming quite friendly and confidential with the Colonel, “there’s a fellow with our command,—an Englishman,—and he’s got the same name as yours—Corbin—only he’s got a handle to it. He is Sir Archibald Corbin, and I never see a young man so like an old one as he is like you. He just seems to me to be your very image. He ain’t reg’larly attached nor nothin’; he’s just one of them aide’campers. He might be your son. Hain’t you got any son?”
At this, little Miss Letty, who had kept in the background clinging to Miss Jemima, came forward, and the Colonel put one arm around her.
“I had a son,—a noble son,—but he laid down his life in defense of his State, and this is his orphan child,” said he.