Leaving the decimated corps to reorganize, I hastened down the hill again, and arrived at the bottom only to find a group of reporters and Mackerels
surrounding a manly prostrate form. Company 2 had just succeeded in routing some Confederacies from a melon-patch, and Captain Samyule Sa-mith was improving the opportunity to expire once more in an affecting manner.
Lifting his feeble head when he saw me, and pulling a small flag a little further out of a side-pocket in his coat, the perishing warrior smiled half way down his chin, and says he:
"I still live! All hail to the old fla—"
"One moment, if you please!" shouted Colonel Wobert Wobinson, breaking through the group.—"Could you make it convenient to pay me that dollar you owe me, Samyule?"
Samyule arose deliberately to his feet again, my boy, wearing upon his countenance the most awful expression I ever saw upon a human face.
"Well," says Samyule, furiously, "I've tried to die for my country three times to-day, and never got further than the old fla—! There is such vulgarity in them which incessantly surrounds me," says Samyule, bitterly, "that they won't even let me die in peace."
Here a Mackerel chap sniffed differentially, and says he: "But you was trying to die in war, capting."
There was something so inhuman in the idea of a man making a joke on such a serious occasion, as that, my boy, that the entire party was struck dumb with horror; and one of the spectators retired precipitately behind a tree, where I immediately heard him laughing wildly with joy over the thought that it was not