With pretty Nelly at the piano, her blue eyes raised to heaven, and Jack Fleming accompanying her on her guitar, his dark eyes raised to Nelly, the effect was overwhelming; and lest somebody should quite finish us by singing, "Flee as a bird to the mountain," we would hasten to demand the "Bonnie Blue Flag," or "Dixie," or the polite invitation to "Joe Hooker" to "come out the Wilderness," or, better still, a good story. The latter call would bring many we had heard before—there are so few good stories in the world—but we would welcome each one with applause, even if it were no better than the story of Captain —— (I can't remember the captain's name) and his black boy "Cæsar." I can only vouch for the story, which ran thus:—
The captain, going into a skirmish one day, left his tent and its contents in the care of the boy. "Mayn't I go he'p de cook?" said Cæsar, much desiring to place himself farther in the rear.
"Stay here, sir, and protect my property!" sternly commanded his master.
Cæsar, when left alone, grew unhappy, and when straggling shot fell like hail around the tent, he incontinently fled and hid in the bushes. When he returned, he found an angry captain indeed.
"You rascal! Didn't I leave you here to protect my property? It might have been all stolen."
"I knows it, sah, I knows it! An' I did purtect yo' property, sah! I sholy did! Dem ole cloes ain' wuth nothin'! I'se feared to bresh 'em less'n I git a hole in 'em; but dis property," laying his hand proudly on his breast, "dis property is wuth fifteen hundred dollars!"
Of course so good a story was soon capped by another. One of the boys who had been with my General at Williamsburg could tell it. A shell had entered the domain of pots and kettles and created what Domingo the cook termed a "clatteration." He at once started for the rear.
"What's de matter, Mingo?" asked a fellow-servant, "whar you gwine wid such a hurrification?"
"I gwine to git out o' trouble—dar whar I gwine. Dar's too much powder in dem big things. Dis chile ain't gwine bu'n hisself! An' dar's dem Minnie bullets, too, comin' frew de a'r, singin': 'Whar—is—you? Whar—is—you?' I ain't gwine stop an' tell 'em whar I is! I'se a twenty-two-hundurd-dollar nigger, an' I'se gwine tek keer o' what b'longs to marster, I is."