It was an odd meeting with the crowd that collected about me and anxiously asked the news from Richmond, from abroad, but above all, from home. Bronzed and bearded, their huge boots caked with Potomac mud and rough shirts open at their sunburnt throats; chapped hands and faces grimy with smoke and work, there was yet something about these men that spoke them, at a glance, raised above the herd. John Leech, who so reveled in the "Camps at Cobham," would here have found a companion-piece for the opposition of the picture.
"Hello, old boy! any news from home?" yelled a whiskered sergeant, jumping from a log where he was mending a rent in his pants, and giving me a hand the color of his favorite tan gloves in days lang syne—"Pretty tight work up here, you see, but we manage to keep comfortable!"—God save the mark!
"What do you think Bendann would give for a negative of me?" asked a splendid fellow leaning on an ax, the rapid strokes of which he stilled at my approach—"Not a half bad thing for a fancy ball, eh?" Charles street had no nattier man than the speaker in days gone; and the tailors had found him their pearl beyond price. But Hilberg's best was now replaced by a flannel shirt with many a rent, army pants and a jacket that had been gray, before mud and smoke had brought it near the unity of Joseph's best garment.
"I'd show well at the club—portrait of a gentleman?" he added lightly.
"Pshaw! Look at me! There's a boot for a junior assembly! Wouldn't that make a show on a waxed floor?" and little Charley H. grinned all the way across his fresh, fair face, as he extended a foot protruding from what had been a boot.
"D——l take your dress! Peel those onions, Charley!" cried a baldheaded man from the fire—"Don't your heart rise at the scent of this olla, my boy? Don't it bring back our dinners at the Spanish legation? Stay and dine with us—if Charley ever has those onions done—and you'll feast like a lord-mayor! By the way, last letters from home tell me that Miss Belle's engaged to John Smith. You remember her that night at Mrs. R.'s fancy ball?"
"Wouldn't mind having a bottle of Mrs. R.'s sherry now to tone up these onions," Charley said ruefully. "It would go well with that stew, taken out of a tin cup—eh, cookey?"
"We had lots better at the club," the cook said, thoughtfully stirring the mess on the fire—"It was laid in before you were born, Charley. Those were days, boys—but we'll drink many a bottle of it yet under the stars and bars!"
"That we will, old man! and I'll carry these boots to a junior assembly yet. But I would like a bottle of old Mrs. R.'s to drink now, faute de mieux, to the health of the Baltimore girls—God bless 'em!"
"That I would, too," said the sergeant. "But that's the hard part of it!"—and he stuck his needle viciously through the pants—"I always get savage when I think of our dear women left unpro——"