Stories of the Soil
The Little Things of Life, Happening All Over the World and Caught in Ink for Trotwood’s Monthly.
War Babies.
The most gigantic struggle of modern times was the American Civil War. In no other country but this, with its breadth of conservativeness and its dearth of caste, could the bitterness of such a war have been so quickly forgotten. As it is in a few more decades, if the same spirit of good feeling continues to prevail, and the fanatics be allowed to die a natural death, it will be a question as to which side will have the most respect for the brave men of the other. A striking feature of the great war, to me, has always been the unanimity with which the entire country, with the probable exception of the military leaders themselves, expected the war to speedily terminate. In the South the enlisted men all feared it would end before they had time to get into a rousing good battle, and the same feeling appears to have existed among the Northern volunteers.
As an illustration of this feeling in the South, in talking to an old farmer the other day, and he a gallant cavalryman, who belonged to Forrest’s immortal command, he laughingly remarked, that the greatest number of colts he ever saw at one time was a certain Tennessee cavalry regiment the first year after the war. “You see,” he said, “none of us expected the war to last over three or six months, and never dreamed it would go over a year. Nearly every man in our regiment went in on his pet saddle mare or half thoroughbred, and fully two-thirds of us were horse breeders, on a greater or less scale, while at home. But the war went on, we were ordered here and there, hundreds of miles from home with plenty of fighting and little else to think of. We were kept so busy that many of us, in fact, had forgotten all about the spring breeding, and would have been glad if it had forgotten about itself. But not so; the next spring there came the colts—war babies, to be sure—dropped into a hard world at a cruel and unmotherly time, and before we knew it our regiment had more colts than we knew what to do with. I had to send my mare home and get a fresh mount, and the others traded around, or left dam and colt to shift for themselves in strange and foreign lands. I have often wondered what became of that crop of colts, the first breeding venture of our regiment.”
A Contest in the King’s English.
There is a young darky downtown, at a livery stable, who has been priding himself on his ability, as he expressed it, “ter fling English.” But he takes no pride in it any more. Old Wash cured him, and it happened this way:
“Wheneber I goes down dar arter yo’ mare,” the old darky said, “dis heah young niggah gins ter fling his English ’roun’ scan’lus. I tell you, boss, I’m gittin’ tired ob dat, an’ I’m gwi’ teach ’im how ter talk English sho’ nuff some day. I sw’ar to you, sah,” said the old man, as he mopped his face with his red handkerchief, “It’s so hot I’ve mighty nigh multerplied, an’ I’ve got de commissary rumertism, ter boot; but jes you watch out fur me de naixt time dat nigger ’gins ter fling his jaw-bone ’roun’ whar I’m standin’—jes you watch me riddle ’im wid sintax an’ orfrography an’ sich! Jes you watch!”
For several days after that I noticed the old man studying an old Davies Geometry and an obsolete work on synonyms, which I had sent to the attic long ago—looking, as he expressed it, for “some good cuss-words to fit de ’casion.” But I had forgotten all about it until one evening I drove into the stable with him. A sprightly young darky ran out, took the mare by the bit, and patronizingly remarked: