But what really was singular in the appearance of the apartment, and what Crawford noted at once, although he did not allude to it until afterwards, was—first, a ghastly attempt at painting, hanging behind the chimney, representing a death's-head and cross-bones, which might have been executed by an artist in whitewash, on a ground of black muslin. Second, a hanging shelf in one corner, with a dozen or two of dingy small bottles and vials, and a rod lying across it, apparently made from a black birchen switch, peeled in sections. Third, and most important of all, a string of twine suspended from one side of the room to the other, in front of the fire-place and near the ceiling, and hung with objects that required a moment to recognize. Among them, when closely examined, could be found two or three bats, dried; a string of snake's eggs, blackened by being smoked; a tail and two legs of a black cat; a bunch of the dried leaves of the black hellebore; a snake's skin—not the "shedder" or superficial skin, but the cuticle itself, peeled from the writhing reptile; two objects that might have been spotted toads, run over by wagons until thoroughly flattened—then dried; and one object which could not well be anything more or less than the hand of a child a few weeks old, cut off just above the wrist and subjected to some kind of embalming or drying process.

The purposes of this narrative do not require the recording of all the conversation which took place between the Tombs lawyer and Aunt Synchy, when the latter had dusted off one of the miserable chairs and forced the former down into it, taking another herself, sitting square in front of him, and thrusting her face so close into his that the withered features seemed almost plastered against his own. It is enough to say that that conversation corroborated the suspicion which the first words of the crone would have engendered—that Aunt Synchy, in her younger days, had been a slave in the Crawford family, in a neighboring State where the institution had not yet been entirely abolished—and that, at last manumitted by a mistaken kindness, she had finally wandered away to the crime and misery of negro life in the great city. She retained, as people of that feudal class always do, a vivid recollection of her early life and of all the residents of the section where she had lived; and Egbert Crawford, who was in the habit of putting many questions to others, was not in the habit of answering quite so many as the old woman put to him concerning the intermediate histories of the families of which she had now lost sight for more than a quarter of a century.

In this conversation it became apparent, too, that Thomas Crawford, the father of Egbert, had been the quasi owner of Synchy, and that she retained for the son something of that singular attachment which appears to be inseparable from any description of feudality. Thomas Crawford, it would appear, had had two brothers, Richard, the father of the present Richard Crawford and of John, the soldier, both Thomas and Richard being then dead and their families in the country broken up. Another brother, John, had become very wealthy, and appeared to be living, with Mary, an only daughter, at West Falls, in the Oneida Valley. Finally, it became quite apparent that the old crone, whatever her attachment to the family of Thomas Crawford, did not hold the same feudal regard for some of the other members of the family—in short, that she had retained the memory of certain supposed early slights and injuries, quite as closely as she had done the softer and more grateful sentiments towards others.

"So Dick am rich, am he, honey? an you am poor? Tut! tut! dat is too bad for de son of ole Marser Tom!" said the old crone, after the lapse of half an hour in which both tongues had been running pretty rapidly.

"He is," said Crawford, his face expressing no strong sense of satisfaction at the recollection. "He bought property in the new parts of the city, twelve or fifteen years ago, and the rise has been so great that it has made him rich. He is now living on Murray Hill, in style, though, d—n him!" and the face now was very sinister indeed, "he has been attacked with inflammatory rheumatism and confined for some weeks to his house, so that I don't think he enjoys it all very much."

"An Uncle John's big property," the old woman went on—"Dick is to have all dat, too, you tink?"

"Yes, and Mary," answered Crawford. "Mary is a pretty little girl, and worth as much as all the property. Dick has managed to get around the old man, somehow, and if I can't stop it—"

"Eh, yes, if you can't stop 'um!" said the old crone, rubbing her skinny hands together as if this, at least, pleased her. "Has you tried, honey?"

Egbert Crawford, Tombs lawyer, as has before been said, was much more in the habit of putting others under close cross-examination, than allowing himself to be subjected to the same sifting process. But whether he had his own motives for telling the old woman the truth, or whether he saw that those coal black old eyes were looking through him and divining all that he wished or intended—he certainly submitted to the question and told the truth, in the present instance:

"Yes, d—n him once more!"

"You want Mary and de property bofe?" asked the old woman again.

"Both!" answered the lawyer, after one more instant of hesitation and one more glance into the coal black eyes. "I don't care if you know all about it—you daren't betray me, for your life!"

"Don't want to, honey!" was all the old woman's reply; and the lawyer went on:

"I have been twice up at West Falls since Dick was taken ill, and I think I have set some reports in circulation there, that may make Miss Mary hesitate, if they do not change the old man's will. How will that do, Aunt Synchy—you old black anatomy? Eh?"

"Spose I am an 'atomy," said the old woman, apparently rather pleased with the epithet than otherwise. "But Lor' bress you, chile, dat won't do at all! You ain't ole enough yet!" and there was an unmistakable sneer on the withered black face, to think that any body could be so verdant.

"Ah!" said Egbert Crawford, who neither liked the sneer nor the intimation. "What more could I do, I should like to know?"

What was it that Jeremy Taylor said—that old silver-tongued Bishop of Down, Connor and Dromore, in Ireland?—"No disease cometh so much with our breath, drinking from the infected lips of others, as with the vessels of our own bodies that are ready to receive it." Shakspeare says the same thing of mirth, when he records that

"A jest's prosperity lies in the ear Of him that hears it, never in the tongue Of him that makes it."

Artemus Ward, when he sets whole audiences into broad roars of laughter over his odd conceits of "carrying peppermint to General Price" or "going to be measured for an umbrella," may doubt the truth of this assertion; and Lester Wallack or Ned Sothern, when inspiring chuckles that almost threaten the life, may share in the infidelity: but let all these remember that their audiences come to be amused, and that their best drolleries might fall very flat indeed at a Quaker meeting or in a hospital devoted to men with the jumping tooth-ache! The conditions of Crime are like those of Disease and Mirth—the patient must be ready before the inoculation can take place. Eve was unquestionably wishing for a break in the already dull routine of her life in Eden, before the Serpent dared to make his appearance; and Arnold had some treason crudely floating through his mind, even if not that particular treason, before the overtures of the British commander led him to the attempted betrayal of the Key of the Highlands. Egbert Crawford, Tombs lawyer, when he said to Aunt Synchy, "What more could I do, I should like to know?" meant to be understood as asserting that nothing more was in his power; but there was really in his heart the wish for aid in some higher crime to effect his purposes; and the tempter came!

"All dat goin' away from you, and nobody in de way but dat miserable chile!" was the only comment of the old woman on Crawford's last question.

"So I suppose," was the puzzled answer.

"Why don't you have a good doctor for him, honey!" asked the old woman, next.

"A good doctor?" queried Crawford, still more puzzled. "Why curse it, woman, what are you talking about? Won't he get well too soon, now, and perhaps be up at West Falls before I am more than half ready for him?"

"Oh, you poor chile—you don't half understan' dis ole woman!" chuckled the crone, delighted to find that she had puzzled the lawyer. "Spose de good doctor so good that he nebber get well? Eh, honey?"

"What? poison?" broke out the lawyer, catching at the old woman's meaning so suddenly that he could not quite control his voice.

"Hush-h-h! you fool!" hissed the old woman, rising at once, hobbling to the door and opening it suddenly—then closing it and returning to her chair. "You call yourself a lawyer, honey, and do such things as dat 'are? Done you know dem policers are sneakin' aroun' ebberywhere, up de stairways as well as ebberywhere else? An if one of dem happened to hear you speak such words, dis ole woman take a ride up to de Islan' in de Black Maria, and you go to de debbil, sure! Know all about 'em, honey—been dare afore!"

"Humph!" said the lawyer, nevertheless using lower voice even for the disclaimer. "No danger, Aunty, I guess! There are no policemen now-a-days—only Provost-Marshal Kennedy's spies, looking for traitors. But what do you mean?—that I should get a doctor to—to—put him out of the way?"

"Dats jes it, honey!" said the old woman, again rubbing her hands. "He is in de way—put him out and have de ole man's money."

"Impossible!" spoke Egbert Crawford, in a tone which would have told a close observer—and probably told the old woman—that he only meant: "I do not see how to do it."

"Give um somefin," graphically said the crone.

"What!" spoke the lawyer, almost in as loud a tone as he had before used, and rising from his chair in apparent indignation.

"Sit down, honey," said the old woman, with the same sneer in her voice that had before been apparent. "Oh, I know you is a good man and wouldn't do nuffin to hurt Cousin Dickey. Didn't kill his dog, nor nuffin, did you, honey, a good wile ago, jes because you didn't like him. Don't do nuffin now, if you don't want to! Let him have de girl, an de ole man's money, an—"

"Woman!" said Egbert Crawford, rising altogether this time, and pacing the floor like a man a good deal unquieted. "I hate Dick Crawford, and you know it. I want Uncle John's money and I want Mary, and he is in my way in both cases. You may as well know the whole truth—I hate him enough to 'put him out of the way,' as we have both called it, but the thing is impossible. Any doctor to whom I should speak would have me arrested at once, for though they poison they do not wish to be suspected of such operations; and there is no other way. He will get well and go up to West Falls, and then all is over!" and the lawyer sunk his head on his breast as if he had been the most ill-used of individuals.

"Not while your ole Aunty libs, Marser Egbert, if you dar do what she tells you!"

The words struck some chord previously active in the brain of Crawford. He glanced up at the string of articles on the line of twine, then stopped short in his walk, before the old woman.

"Well?"

"Oh, you see dem tings, and you is coming to it, is you, honey!" chuckled the crone. "You 'member what Aunt Synchy is, now?"

"Yes, I remember," said Crawford, "though I forget the name. You are an O—Ogee—Odee—no, O—"

"An Obi woman!" said the crone, rising and stretching herself to her full height, with a look that was commanding in spite of her squalor. "You 'member somefin, but not much. We be great people in Jamaica. Up in de hills 'bove Spanish Town, we are de kings and de queens. De great Obi spirit come down to us, when de moon am at its last quarter, an he tell us how to cure and how to kill. We mix de charm at midnight, wid de great Obi 'pearin' to us all de time in de smoke dat rises from de kettle, an de secret words all de time a mutterin'; and de charm works, an kills or cures 'way off hunerds of miles, 'cordin' as we want um for our friens or our enemies. Does you hear, honey?"

"I hear!" said Egbert Crawford, for the moment absorbed if not fascinated by the developments of this real or affected superstition; but not carried away, it may be believed, from the influence which this hideous old woman might be able to exert on his own fortunes.

"Mammy—you don't 'member ole Mammy?"—the old woman went on. "Captain Lewis brought Mammy an me from Jamaica more'n fifty years ago. She mus' have died when you was a little picanninny. She was de great Obi woman, de queen of dem all; and she tole me afore she died, so's I could do mos' as much. Many's de lub potion Mammy an me has mixed up, dat has made some ob de wite bosoms fuller afore dey was done workin; and many's de charm—"

"Poh! nonsense! don't say 'charm'; call it 'dose'!" broke in the lawyer, at last impatient. "I believe you can kill, whether you can cure or not, Aunt Synchy; but I am a man, with some experience in the world, and I don't believe in your Obi. All your dead cats and babies' hands and snakes yonder, are just so many tricks to influence the superstitious. I know better, and they don't influence me!"

"Oh, dey doesn't, eh, honey? You is too smart an don't believe in de Obi?" For the moment her face was lowering and threatening—then it changed again to the same wrinkled Sphynx as before. "Nebber mind—you is my boy, an I lubs you, an so you 'sult de ole woman widout de Obi payin' you for it! Call it 'dose,' then, honey—many's de dose dat dese hans have mixed, dat has made de coffin-maker hab somefin to do and sent de property where it belonged."

"I believe you!" was the laconic comment of Egbert Crawford, when the crone, spite of his interruptions, had finished her long rigmarole. What followed may quite as well be imagined as described. Richard Crawford was doomed to be operated upon by one of those insidious and deadly vegetable poisons, outwardly applied, in which none have such horrible skill as the crones of the African race who have derived their knowledge from the West India Islands. Whether it should be brought near the head by concealment in a pillow, or near the more vital portions of the body itself through use of a bandage worn near the skin,—the effect would be the same—insensible debilitation, decline, death! But the latter plan would be much the more rapid; and in neither event, when the deed was done, would there be one mark, perceptible even to the dissecting surgeon, telling that other than natural decay had brought about dissolution.

Ten minutes afterwards, Aunt Synchy was busy compounding a black paste, from various preparations which she found among the vials on the shelf and under one corner of the heap of rags which she called her bed—crooning all the while a dismal attempt at a tune which made even the not-over-sensitive lawyer shudder, and putting the mixture at last into his hands with a "Lor' bress you, honey!" which might have made any one shudder if he had understood the connection. Fifteen minutes later, the Tombs lawyer left Thomas Street, without the information of which he had originally come in search, but his mind now full of other things, and bearing in his mind the mental label of the prescription: "to be used as directed."

So vice buds into crime whenever opportunity offers, and the Hazaels of the world, who have believed that they never could be brought to "do this thing," pursue it with an energy and determination shaming the efforts of older offenders. Yesterday only an illicit lover: to-day the destroyer of children unborn! Yesterday only an ordinary scoundrel: to-day the worst and most deadly of all murderers—the poisoner!

Three months later—to wit, toward the close of June—that state of affairs was existing at the house of Richard Crawford, which has before been indicated. What was it, indeed, that Josephine Harris had dimly discovered?



CHAPTER VIII.

THE TWO RIVALS AT JUDGE OWEN'S—A COMBAT A LA OUTRANCE BETWEEN THE BANCKER AND THE WALLACE—ALMOST A CHALLENGE, AND A TRIAL OF EVERY-DAY COURAGE.

Return we now to the somewhat too-long neglected Miss Emily Owen and the other inmates and intimates of Judge Owen's pleasant house near the Harlem River.

Some days had elapsed after the conversation between Emily and Aunt Martha, bringing the time to the first of July and the commencement of that fire-cracker abomination that was to culminate on the Fourth in a general distraction. Some days had elapsed—as has already been noted; and judging by the person who sat nearest to Miss Emily Owen in the faintly-lighted parlor, at about half past eight in the evening, the Judge's praises of Col. Bancker and animadversions of Frank Wallace had not been without their effect on the young girl. Both the rival suitors were present, and so was Aunt Martha; but Frank Wallace made a somewhat dim and undefined picture as he sat near one of the front windows, apparently observing the boys deep in the mysteries of fire-crackers and torpedoes; while the Colonel was in altogether a better light as he sat near Emily and nearly under the half-lighted chandelier. Emily was indulging in the peculiarly American vice of rolling backward and forward in a rocking-chair; the Colonel had one leg over the other and was drumming with the opened blade of his penknife on the cover of the book he held in his hand; and Aunt Martha was ruining what eyes she had left, by some kind of crochet-work in cotton that may possibly have been a "tidy."

Frank and the Colonel had come in very nearly together, yet not together, about half an hour before. Some little conversation had ensued, but very little, for the rivals instinctively hated each other, and Wallace could not manage to string ten words in his rival's presence without throwing hits at him in a manner decidedly improper. Perhaps Emily had taken the Colonel's part a little, spite of her aversion to him; and the result was that Master Frank had fallen partially into the sulks and gone off to the end of the room—quite as far as he intended to go at that juncture, however.

The young man might be pardoned if he felt for the moment a little vexed. Though not forbidden the house of Judge Owen, and treated with cold politeness when he entered it (of course with one exception)—he knew very well that he was an object of dislike to the portly Judge, and he always endeavored so to time his visits that he might avoid that parental potentate. That afternoon he had accidentally seen the Judge (who had anticipated his summer vacation) step on board the Hudson River cars, with Mrs. Owen, for a day or two somewhere up the Hudson; and he had very naturally made his calculations upon a quiet evening with Emily. And now to find the Colonel dividing the opportunity with him—nay more, to find Emily even siding a little with the valorous Colonel!—it was too bad, was it not?

Perhaps the young lover would not have fallen into his partial sulks quite so easily, had he been aware that Col. Bancker had announced his intention of being at the house in the evening (as he had not), and that Emily had begged her aunt to come down from her room and sit with her in the parlor, on purpose to prevent the expected Colonel having an opportunity for one word with her in private. But these men are so unreasonable as well as so blind! There is no satisfying them, especially with the amount of attention shown them by a woman whom they happen to fancy that they love. Perhaps men do not grow actually jealous any more easily than women, but they grow "miffed" and "hurt" a thousand times easier—let the fact be recorded. There is one instance on legendary record, of a woman who divided her husband with another, at the time of the chivalrous adventures of the Crusaders; but the instance has not yet come to light of the man who so divided his wife. Mormonism at the present day shows the pitch even of fanatical tolerance to which the female mind can be wrought in this direction; while we have yet to look for the corresponding instance on the other side, in which the women of a community appropriate to themselves half a dozen or fifty husbands each, and the men consent to the division.

This difference goes much farther even than the regulation (can such a thing be regulated?) of jealousy. Where no jealousy exists, exclusiveness and the sense of propriety comes into the account—again on the male side of the calculation. Jones and his wife being both wall-flowers at any evening party, Mrs. Jones did not feel aggrieved, but rather proud, at Mrs. Thompson's re-union, that Jones went off for an hour to pay the usual flirting attention to the wives of half a dozen of his acquaintances; while Jones colored to the eyes and could scarcely be restrained from making a fool of himself, because Robinson sat down in the vacant chair beside his wife, and tried to be agreeable. And when the Emperor and Lady Flora were at Niagara last summer, it is not upon record that the lady made any objection to the gentleman lingering an hour too late upon Goat Island with that blonde-haired English girl who was such an unmistakeable flirt,—while the gentleman went on like a madman on the balcony of the Cataract, because Lady Flora ran away for half an hour in broad daylight, to Prospect Point, with an old friend of her father's, oelat fifty and incurably an invalid. Ah, well—so it has been from the days of the first flirtation (always except that of Adam and Eve, when there was neither male nor female rival in the neighborhood), and so it will be to the last—with those arrogant, unreasonable, unsatisfied "lords of the creation."

A word of description of the two rivals, as yet unintroduced, who on that occasion sunned themselves in the eyes of Emily Owen, though at such different distances from the luminary.

Lt. Colonel John Boadley Bancker (let him have his full name once more, for the honor of the service—be the same more or less!) was a rather tall and slight man, gentlemanly in appearance and action, but with an occasional dash of swagger that somehow did not indicate courage, and the undefinable impression of the "old beau." His face was well-formed, except that the nose was too large and too prominently aquiline. He had faultlessly black side-whiskers and hair correspondingly black—too black, Frank Wallace said—not to have been "doctored" by Batchelor or Cristadoro, at least. The dark eyes were a little faded, and there were crows-feet at the corners of the same eyes, for age has its own way of telling its story, and not all of us who wish to be young can alter the record in the old family Bible. In dress Colonel Bancker presented no variation from the other colonels of the volunteer service—wearing the full blue uniform, shoulder-straps and belts, with the number of his regiment wrought in gold on the front of a broad brimmed hat lying on a book-table near him. Not an ill-looking man by any manner of means, in spite of the violent antipathy for him which Miss Emily had managed to transmute out of her regard for Wallace.

"Age before beauty!" is a motto somewhat popular, so the Colonel has had the preference. Frank Wallace, proprietor of a small but thriving job-printing establishment before spoken of, and would-be proprietor of the heart and hand of Miss Emily Owen—was altogether a different style of man from the puissant Colonel. As he lounged at the window in his suit of loose-fitting gray Melton, he looked very young indeed and created rather the impression of a "little fellow." He probably fell at least three or four inches short of the romantic six feet, in reality; but was the owner of a fine erect and well-rounded gymnastic form, not a little improved by frequent visits to the Seventh Regiment Gymnasium. A jolly round face with very fair complexion, a merry blue eye, short, curly brown hair and a full moustache somewhat darker,—made up the ensemble of the particular person destined to be the torment of Judge Owen—and of others. For Frank Wallace, be it understood, had other penchants besides his attachment to pretty Emily—fun being the other and leading propensity. He was a capital mimic, an incorrigible banterer, and in any other company than that of the woman he loved, and her family, the merriest and most jocular soul alive. Sometimes when alone with her, and with the "spooniness" which will attach to male courtship before twenty-five, fairly shaken off, he could be a gay, dashing and even a presuming lover. Just now he was unamiable—not to say wicked, and ready for any use of his glib tongue which could send the blue coat out of the house at "double-quick."

It could not have been malice—it certainly must have been want of thought—that induced Aunt Martha to break the temporary silence with the remark, addressed to the Colonel:

"It is a funny question I am going to ask, I know, Colonel, but I suppose I have an old woman's privilege. Mrs. Owen and myself were talking about ages a day or two ago, and she thought you were more than thirty-five. How old are you?"

If half a paper of pins, with all the points upward, had suddenly made their appearance in the bottom of the Colonel's chair, he probably could not have been more discomfited. What reason he had to be unquiet, will be more apparent at a later period. He fidgetted a little and hemmed more than once, before he replied:

"Humph! hum! Well, Madame, to tell you the truth, I am a little on the shady side of extreme youth—old enough to be through with my juvenile indiscretions—ha! ha!" (The laugh decidedly forced and feeble). "I am a little over thirty-two—was thirty-two in March last."

"I thought so! I was sure you could not be older than that!" said Aunt Martha, in the most natural way in the world, while Emily took a quick look round at the Colonel, which said, much plainer than words: "Oh, what a bouncer!"

"No, Madame," added the Colonel, perhaps aware that fibs require to be told over at least twice before they acquire the weight of truths told once. "No, Madame, a fraction over thirty-two, as I said."

At that moment the invisible influences, if they have good ears, may have heard Frank Wallace getting up from his chair, and muttering between his teeth something very like:

"Humph! well, I cannot stand this any longer! If I do not succeed in making the house too warm to hold that respectable individual, within ten minutes, I shall certainly leave it myself!" Just then the words "thirty-two," from the Colonel's lips, met his ear, and though he did not catch the context, so as to know what it was all about, the spirit of malicious (and it must be said, reckless) mischief, prompted him to lounge leisurely forward and take a share in the conversation, although uninvited.

"Ah, Colonel, did I understand you to say thirty-two?"

"Yes, I said thirty-two!" said the personage addressed, with a stiffness contrasting very forcibly with the suavity of his speech to Aunt Martha. Emily, who, as may be supposed, knew Frank Wallace better than any other person in the house, at that moment caught a glimpse of his face under the chandelier, and saw that trouble was brewing. The sulk had gone, and the badger, a much more dangerous devil in society, had taken its place. Two antagonistic acids were certainly coming together, and an explosion was very likely to be the result. Yet what could the poor girl do, except to wait the crash and be ready to act as peacemaker when the worst came to the worst? The one thing she would have liked to do, was precisely the thing she dared not do for her life—that was, to spring up, catch her young lover by the arm, drag him out into the garden, pet him a good deal and kiss him a very little, and send him home doubtful whether he was walking on his head or his heels—while her old beau might spend the whole evening, if he liked, with Aunt Martha. Millie would give her bright eyes to be able to do the same thing with Tom, stately Madame mere, when all she dares do in your presence is to sit still, answer in monosyllables, steal sly glances when you are not looking, and be generally dull and stupid. Would it not be well to let them out occasionally, Madame mere, for half an hour's play, with full consent and confidence, as they let out the colts in the country? Who knows but they might behave the better for it, when out of your sight altogether? Think of it, Madame mere, and make public the result of your experiment! But all this is grossly irrelevant, and springs out of the fact that Emily, who wished to drag Frank Wallace out of the danger of an approaching melee, had not the power to do so.

"Indeed I always thought there were thirty-nine!" said the young scamp, in the most natural tone of surprise imaginable, and in response to the Colonel's last "thirty-two."

"Thirty-nine what, sir?" asked the Colonel, with the same sign of intense disgust upon his face that we have sometimes seen on Harry Placide's, when playing Sir Harcourt Courtley and uttering the words: "Good gracious! who was addressing you?"

"Oh, I really beg pardon," replied the young man, in a tone which meant that he did nothing of the kind. "I thought I heard Mrs. West and yourself speaking of the religious aspects of the country, and that you were enumerating the articles of faith."

"Oh no, you were quite mistaken, Mr. Wallace!" said Aunt Martha, very calmly, while Emily directed an appealing look at the scapegrace, which might as well have been a putty pellet fired at the brown-stone Washington in the Park, for any effect it produced.

"No sir, we were talking of nothing of the kind!" said the Colonel, with that kind of severe dignity intended to convey: "This closes the conversation."

"Then of course it is my duty to beg pardon once more," said the incorrigible. "But you might have been talking on that subject, you know, without any impropriety. The religious aspects of the country are deplorable!" throwing up his hands and eyes in no bad imitation of Aminadab Sleek. "Do you not think so, Colonel?"

"Sir!" said the Colonel, still more severely, "I had not been thinking of the subject at all!"

"Oh yes," the scapegrace went on—"deplorable! War desolating the country—all the restraints of society removed or weakened—no Sabbath at all—gambling and libertinism in the army and infidelity among the officers—Colonel, I really hope you will excuse me! of course I do not mean to make any allusion to the present company—but I repeat that the present religious aspects of the country are deplorable."

"And I repeat, sir," spoke the Colonel, with even more severity than before, while Aunt Martha's face began to assume an expression that might easily have deepened into a smile, and Emily had serious trouble to keep from a broad grin—"I repeat, sir, that we were not speaking of the religious aspects of the country at all!"

"Pshaw! of course not! How stupid I am!" said the tormentor, who had by this time dropped into a chair a little behind the Colonel's left shoulder, where he could literally talk into his ear. "It was the number that deceived me, as I heard it from the window. I should have known what you were saying, at once. You are right in the remark that had we had only thirty-two States instead of thirty-four, this rebellion might never have occurred. Had South Carolina, with its rampant Calhounism, and Massachusetts with its anti-slavery fanaticism, both been left out of the compact—"

"I must beg pardon, now, for interrupting you, Mr. Wallace," said Aunt Martha, with the calmest of voices and the smile all smoothed away from her face. "You are mistaken again. We were neither discussing religious nor national affairs, when you were so kind as to come down and join us." (Emphasis on the word "kind," which made the young man wince a little and for the moment predisposed the Colonel to a chuckle.) "Colonel Bancker was saying—"

"Really, my dear Madame," put in the Colonel, "it is scarcely necessary to repeat—"

"Oh, we have had quite enough of misconceptions," said that estimable lady, with what appeared to be another shot at Wallace. "Let us have the truth at last. I had the impoliteness to ask Colonel Bancker his age, and he had the courtesy to say that he was just turned of thirty-two."

"Ph-ph-ph-ph-ew!" came in a long whistle from the lips of the tormentor. The Colonel sprung to his feet in an instant, and looked angrily around. Frank Wallace was quite on the other side of the room, examining a pastel over the mantel, and whistling very slightly, but he was certainly whistling the serenade from "Pasquali."

"Sir!" said the Colonel, rage in the word.

"Meaning me?" asked Wallace, turning around.

"Was that whistle intended for me, sir?" demanded the Colonel, tragically.

"Certainly not," answered Wallace. "I was directing my whistle, which is not a good one, and certainly impolite in company—at the cornice. The cornice is a handsome one, you will notice, Colonel, and I think by Garvey. Those festoons of roses—"

"Mr. Wallace, you shall answer to me for this!" broke out the Colonel, now no longer master of himself.

"Gentlemen! gentlemen!" said Aunt Martha, rising.

"Don't, Frank! for heaven's sake don't torment him any more!" plead Emily, passing rapidly before her lover and speaking in a low tone. Whether he understood her is a question to be settled between them at some future time. "Don't!" is a very easy thing to say, when Niagara is pouring or a herd of wild buffaloes sweeping down; but if the imploration is addressed to either of the moving bodies, it may not win quick obedience. As the human temper is a combination of the torrent, the herd, and all the other unmanageable things in nature and beyond, "Don't!" even from a voice that we love, with right and reason behind it, is sometimes painfully powerless. There is no intention, on the part of the narrator, of defending the previous or subsequent action of Mr. Frank Wallace on this occasion; but actual events must be recorded.

"Well sir, and what am I to answer?" asked the young man, without a quiver in his voice, but with much more earnest in it than it had before manifested.

"You made an offensive comment on my veracity, by whistling, a moment ago."

"And what then, sir?"

"That offensive comment shows that you doubt my veracity!"

"Gentlemen! gentlemen!" again spoke Aunt Martha; and poor Emily, now half frightened out of her wits, made one more attempt at imploring her lover to be quiet. This done, and both now aware that the tide, on one side at least, had overflowed the bounds of all prudence, they desisted, stepped back from between the rivals, and allowed the quarrel to take its own course.

"And suppose I do doubt your veracity!" answered Wallace to the last remark of the Colonel. "You call yourself thirty-two! Bah! you are fifty, if you are ten!" The obvious rage on the countenance of the Colonel did not stop the torrent, now, nor even check it! "Such fine crows'-feet under the eyes, as those of yours, never come much before fifty, except in case of a nice round of brandy-smashes, late hours and general dissipation, or—"

"Well, sir, what is the or?" broke out the Colonel, still more furious.

"A severe course of early piety!" concluded the young man, throwing a terrible sting into the tail of his sentence, not less by the manner than the voice.

"You should answer for this, Mr. Wallace, as you call yourself," foamed the Colonel—"but—"

"But what, Lieut. Colonel Bancker—as you try to call yourself?" thundered the young man, in reply.

"Oh, gentlemen! gentlemen! do stop, for the sake of the house!" imploringly put in Aunt Martha at this period; while Emily, seriously frightened, indulged in a few tears that were no doubt set down to the account of her brute of a lover, by the over-watching intelligences. But the quarrel ceased not, even yet, at the bidding of either; and, marvellous to relate, though the front windows were open and they were speaking in a tone altogether too loud for the amenities of society, a crowd had not gathered around the area railing in front.

"But what?" demanded the younger combatant.

"But that my sword, sir—" began the elder.

"Oh, you have a sword, then!" sneered Wallace. "I thought it was all belts!"

"I would chastise you for this, sir, severely," said the officer, "but that my sword is sacred to the cause of the Union. When with my regiment, sir—"

"Yes, I know," again interrupted Wallace, who had his own reasons for believing that the Colonel's regiment was altogether a myth, as so many others have been—"Yes, I know—the Eleven hundred and fifty-fifth Coney Island Thimble-rig Zouaves!"

Human patience could stand this no longer. With one dash for his hat and a surly "Good night, ladies!" coupled with an intimation to Wallace: "You shall hear from me, sir!" Lt. Colonel John Boadley Bancker (let him once more have the full benefit of the name!) strode out of the parlor into the hall, and was about to vanish from the field. But as he passed into the hall the hand of Aunt Martha was laid upon his arm, and her voice—so much pleasanter than that of the tormentor—sounded in his ear. The good aunt, whatever might have been her wish to rid her niece of a match so repugnant, certainly did not wish to produce the riddance in this manner and to send the Colonel out of the house under a sensation of outrage which could not fail to come to the ears of her "big brother." So she passed into the hall with the Colonel, leaving the young people behind her,—and managed to detain the enraged man in the hall and on the piazza for several minutes. It was not the first time, beyond doubt, that she had made peace for others, however she might have martyred her own.

"Oh, Frank! what have you done!" exclaimed the young girl, the moment they had passed out into the hall, her eyes yet dim with the tears of anxiety she had been shedding; but in spite of her fear and even her mortification, laying her hand in that of the reckless young scapegrace whom she truly loved. "Father will hear of this—we shall be separated altogether!" And again she repeated the expostulation of all dairy-maids to all cats or children that have upset pans of milk—"What have you done!"

"What have I done!" echoed the culprit. "Why merely roasted a cowardly humbug who deserves nothing better, and who has not spunk enough to resent it—that is all!"

"But besides my father's anger—I am afraid he may, Frank," said the young girl, looking into her lover's face with real anxiety.

"I only wish he would!" was the reply.

"Why, you do not mean to say that you would fight him?"

"With the sword, if he has one—no!" he said. "Not with anything more dangerous than a piece of rattan. I would not mind polishing off his dainty hide with that! Besides, if I quarrelled with him, who made me? You! He sat too near you, and you not only talked with him but looked at him. What business had you to look at him? Eh?"

"Oh, you cruel fellow!" said the young girl, not disposed to scold more sharply, even at folly, when it had such a sediment of true love lying beneath the froth.

"Oh, you handsome torment!" was the reply of the lover, as he took that one auspicious moment to enfold the young girl in his arms and give her half a dozen warm, close, voluptuous kisses full on the lips—such kisses as people should never indulge in who do not know exactly the haven toward which they are sailing.

"What are you doing now, impudence!" uttered the thoroughly-kissed girl, making just so much resistance as seemed becoming, and yet meeting her lover nearly enough half-way to make the exercise rather exhilarating.

"What am I doing? 'Locking up' a 'form'—you know I am a printer!" said the young man, taking yet another "proof" of affection. But here the alarmed reader will be spared the succession of bad puns, peculiar to the printing-office, with which this specimen was followed, and which has probably been to some extent indulged in by every disciple of Faust more or less in love, since Adam worked off the first proof of his breakfast bill-of-fare, on the original hand-press, in one corner of the Garden of Eden.

The young man was yet standing with his arm around the waist of Emily, just within the door leading from the parlor into the hall, and yet other farewell kisses and reproaches might have been on the possible programme,—when both were startled by a sharp scream from Aunt Martha, who was yet standing on the piazza with the Colonel near her.

"Ough-ough-oh!"

Wallace and Emily at once rushed to the front door, under the belief that some sudden accident had befallen the lady; but at that moment there was a loud crash, followed by other voices screaming; and in the street, almost in front of the door, a painful and threatening spectacle presented itself.

As afterwards appeared, when the various parties became sufficiently collected to ascertain what had really happened—a carriage had been coming along the street from the left, driven rapidly, but with the pair of fine horses under good command. Just before it reached the house of Judge Owen, one of those troublesome boys who ought all to be sent to Blackwell's Island from the twenty-fifth of June until the tenth of July, had thrown a lighted "snake," or "chaser," under the belly of the near horse as he passed. The animals had already become sufficiently frightened by the fire-crackers thrown under them and the pistols exploding at their ears; and at this crowning atrocity they became altogether unmanageable. Spite of the exertions of the practised driver, they shied violently to the left, breaking into a run at the same moment, and the next instant one side of the carriage was whirled upon the curb, so that the hind axle and wheel caught in the lamp-post, happily not tearing apart or overturning the vehicle, but bringing-up with such a shock that the driver was hurled from his seat and thrown to the pavement between the maddened horses.

This state of affairs had drawn the scream from Aunt Martha, and at the instant when Wallace reached the door the people in the carriage were screaming but incapable of getting out, the horses were plunging to such a degree that they must have broken loose in a moment, after making a wreck of the carriage and trampling to death the poor fellow who lay senseless under their feet. At the same time it seemed worth a dozen lives to plunge into that storm of lashing hoofs and do anything to rescue driver and riders from their peril.

"Help! help! oh, save them!—save the poor man—somebody!" cried both the women on the piazza, at a breath; and "Help! help!" rung in a woman's voice from the inside of the carriage. Fifteen or twenty persons had already rushed up, but no one seemed disposed to risk his own life to save others. The Colonel yet stood on one of the steps of the piazza, apparently spell-bound.

"Colonel Bancker, you wanted to try courage with me a little while ago: take hold of those horses, if you dare!" cried Frank Wallace, rushing to the edge of the stoop. The Colonel neither spoke nor stirred. "Coward!" they heard the young man cry, and the next instant—how, none of them knew—he had rushed in upon the horses' heads, spite of their lashing hoofs, had one or both by the bridles, and in an instant more both horses were flung prostrate and helpless. The imminent danger over, some of the bystanders rushed in to assist, the horses were more firmly secured, and the poor driver was dragged out, bloody and half insensible, but not seriously injured. One ready and daring hand had prevented the certain loss of one life, and the probable loss of more. Fire-crackers, pistols and other abominations had vanished from the street as if by magic; the noise over, the horses came again under command; they were raised, and horses, harness and carriage all found comparatively uninjured; the disabled driver was taken to a neighboring drug-store; one of the bystanders volunteered to drive the carriage to its destination, and took his seat on the box; the owner droned out his thanks from the inside of the carriage, in a fat, wheezy voice, mingled with the sobs of a woman in partial hysterics; and the equipage rolled away almost as suddenly as it had come—perhaps not five minutes having been consumed in the whole affair.

Short as was the time occupied, the Colonel had disappeared. When the trouble was over he was no longer standing on the piazza. Frank Wallace had apparently been once beaten down, and had some soiled spots on his Melton, and a few bruises, but he had received no injury of any consequence. For what violent and even dangerous exertion he had undergone, he was unquestionably more than repaid when Aunt Martha caught him by one hand and said fervently, "God bless you!" and when Emily Owen took the other hand with a warmer and fonder pressure than she had ever given it before, and said—so low that probably not even Aunt Martha heard her: "Good—brave—generous Frank!—I won't scold you again in a twelvemonth!"

All that Frank Wallace replied to both these generous outbursts, was comprised in a snap of his fingers in the direction supposed to have been taken by the Colonel, and the words:

"Bah! I told you that man was a coward and wouldn't fight! If he had not pluck enough to risk the feet of those two horses, what would he do in the face of a charge of rebel cavalry!"



CHAPTER IX.

THE FIRST WEEK OF JULY—A CHAPTER THAT SHOULD ONLY BE READ BY THOSE WHO THINK—THE DESPAIR OF THE SEVEN DAYS BATTLES—SHOULDER-STRAPS AND STAY-AT-HOME SOLDIERS—AN INCIDENT OF THE SECOND.

The first week of July, eighteen hundred and sixty-two. What a time it was!—and who that took part in it, in any portion of the loyal States to which the telegraph and the newspaper had reached, can ever forget it? Everything was hopeless, blank despair—dull, dead desolation. Not even the fatal Monday following the defeat of Bull Run, when we believed that all our New York troops had been cut to pieces or fled ingloriously, produced the same total discouragement in the great city. Bull Run was our first signal reverse—the first blow from the rod of national chastisement, that was afterwards to cut so deeply. Though that stroke pained, it also fired and awakened; and repeated blows had not yet produced that weakness and exhaustion so difficult to arouse to any further effort. And we had not, at the same time, passed through the repeated disasters of the few months following, which stunned and hardened while they pained. We were quite unprepared for the disaster, coming as it did after several months of continued comparative victory (the Austerlitz, Jena and Friedland period of the Lincoln Empire, if it has had one); and the country felt it most keenly.

The heart of the nation had been bound up in McClellan. The confidence and love reposed in him may have been man-worship, without ground or reason, but it was no less real and positive. While in the Command-in-Chief, everything had gone well, and the Butler and Burnside expeditions, the two great successes of the war, had been planned and executed. On the Army of the Potomac the people had looked as the bulwark of the country—the central force that should in good time take Richmond and give the last blow to the rebellion. The miserable bickering and paltry fears which had detached McDowell's division from the grand army, to defend Washington when never threatened, had been comparatively unknown or little understood. Many and disastrous months were yet to elapse, before the letters of the Orleans Princes could tear away the curtain of mystery and show the official action in its naked deformity of malice and misjudgment. McClellan had left Manassas with a gallant army of immense force, whose numbers had no doubt been all the while exaggerated to the popular ear. They had proved themselves soldiers and heroes, and had won whenever and wherever brought to the test. The young commander had had the Command-in-Chief taken from him, at the moment when he first moved forward; but it was believed that the change had been made with his consent if not at his own request, so that he might be the more unhampered in the field. We did not know the chain which had been cruelly locked around his strong limbs, and which he had been dragging through every mile of that long march. He had complained, it is true, from Williamsburgh, of the insufficiency of his force for the great end in view; but he was known to be a cautious man, and when he had won Williamsburgh, forced the evacuation of Yorktown and afterwards won Fair Oaks, all fears for him and for the army had been gradually dismissed.

He had been set down to win—to take Richmond: that had formed the great culmination of the programme—the red fire and flourish of trumpets on which the curtain of the rebellion was to go down. If any one had spoken disapprovingly or doubtfully of his long delay in the swamps of the Chickahominy, the reply had been: "Wait patiently! McClellan is slow, but sure. He will take Richmond before he ends the campaign, and that is enough!" Such had been public confidence—the confidence of a public who perhaps did not know the General, but who certainly did not know the government directing and overruling his every action. At last even the time of the great capture had been fixed. Officers leaving on short furlough had been admonished to return quickly, "if they expected to take part in the capture of Richmond." What else could this mean, than confidence on the part of the commanding general, that the approaches to the rebel capital had been made sufficiently close to ensure its capture, and that the prize was at length in his grasp? Then the Fourth of July had been seized upon as the auspicious period, and the whole country had grown ready to celebrate the National Anniversary in the loyal cities, simultaneously with the shouts and bonfires of the Union Army that should then be treading the streets of the conquered capital and opening the prison-doors of the loyal men who had been suffering and starving in the tobacco-warehouses.

Such had been the supposed aspect of affairs in the field, up to the last week of June, and young orators preparing their Fourth of July orations had introduced rounded periods referring to the added glory of the day and the new laurels wreathing the brows of the Union commanders. Those who contemplated speaking on the great day, and had not made any allusion to the fall of Richmond in their prepared orations, had already seen cause to repent the omission. One, who had incautiously mentioned in a city passenger-car that "he hoped Richmond would not be taken until after the Fourth," and who had lacked time to give as a reason that "if it should be taken before, he would be obliged to write his oration all over again"—had been assaulted for the offensive expression, and only escaped after a hard fight, with a black eye and a sense of damaged personal dignity. It had been settled that Richmond was to be in possession of the Union troops on the Fourth—wo to him who doubted it!

Hark! was there muttering thunder in the heavens?—thunder from a sky hitherto all bright blue? Business men, going down town on the morning of the twenty-eighth of June, found that "fighting had commenced before Richmond," and that "McClellan was changing his front." That "change of front" looked ominous. A few read the secret at once—that heavy reinforcements had come into Richmond from the half-disbanded rebel army Halleck had checked but not defeated at Corinth; and coupled with strange rumors of this came hints about "Stonewall Jackson," which indicated to the same persons that that rebel officer had advanced from the North-west and made an attempt to take McClellan's right wing in flank, necessitating a retrograde movement of that wing to bring him in front. Still, confidence was not lost, in McClellan or in the army. While his right wing fell back before an attack in force, his left might swing in towards Richmond and even take the city—who could say?

Then the telegraph closed down, and the morning papers contained "no later intelligence" from the field before Richmond. This was "the feather that broke the camel's back" of the national spirit. The government had no confidence in the people—it dared not trust them with the truth—it dared conceal! Our army was being cut to pieces, and we were permitted to know nothing of the calamity except the dreadful fact. No development could have been so injurious as this concealment—no stroke at the national confidence so deadly as the want of reliance shown by the government censors. The nation's heart went down beneath the blow: to this day[6] it has never risen to the same proud and courageous determination shown through all previous disasters.

[Footnote 6: January, 1863.]

It is said to be a terrible spectacle when a strong man weeps—a thousand times more terrible than the grief of the softer sex and the gentler nature, because it is evident what must have been the blow inflicted and what the struggle before the pent waters burst forth. But even the strong man's grief is tame compared to the spectacle of the grief of a nation—that aggregation of strong men and of vital interests. When the very sky seems dimmed and the bright sunshine a mockery. When the foot falls without energy and the voice breaks forth without emphasis. When men, who meet on the corners of streets, clasp hands in silence or only speak in low and broken words. When the silver moonlight seems to be shining upon nothing else than new-made graves. When the sound of revelry from ball-rooms jars upon the heart until it creates deadly sickness; and the glare of lights from places of public amusement seems to be an indecorum like a waltz at a funeral. When a uniform in the street is a reproach and a horror; and the music of the band to which soldiers tramp, sounds like nothing but the "Dead March in Saul." When business is impossible, and idleness an agony. When the old flag is looked up to without pride, and the very pulses of patriotism seem dead because they have no hope to keep them in motion. When all is darkness—all discouragement—all shame—all despair. These are the tears of a broad land—this is the spectacle we witness when a nation weeps. The loyal men of this generation have wept more bitterly and sorely, within the past two years, than those wept who saw the armies of the Revolution starved and outnumbered—who pined in the Prison-Ships and tracked the bloody snow at Valley Forge. God forgive those who have wrung these tears—whatever the ultraism they may represent! The people they have outraged will not forgive until a terrible vengeance is taken.

The first days of July, when fell the President's fifth proclamation, calling for "three hundred thousand more." If ever a cry of despair burst out from an overcharged heart, it went up to heaven from the whole land at that moment. "Have I yet more to give?" cried the depopulated city and the desolated village. "Have I yet more to give?" cried the father with one son remaining of his six brave boys; "Have I yet more to give?" echoed the widow whose last stay was to be taken from her; and "Have I yet more to give?" re-echoed the wife as she buckled the sword or the bayonet-sheath on the side of her husband and sent him forth as one more sacrifice to the insatiate demons of Ambition and Mismanagement. Have not the days following Manassas, and the Seven Days before Richmond, and Fredericksburgh, been hours in a national Gethsemane? And has not the hand been almost excusable, lifted in the prayer: "Father of Nations!—if it be possible let this cup pass from us!" And yet the cup has not passed—we have been draining it to the very dregs!

The introduction of this chapter, which does not in the least advance the action of the story, would be altogether inexcusable, did not every artist have a habit of painting a background for his historical composition, instead of throwing the figures on the naked canvas and thereby losing half his little chance of illusion. The characters here introduced may live and move, but relieved against what? The background of current events, certainly—without a knowledge of which their actions might be altogether unaccountable. And general as may be a feeling to-day, it must be caught and put upon record to-morrow, or the very persons who held it most deeply will forget it by the third day. Ten years hence—perhaps a year hence—the bitter humiliation through which the country has been passing between the opening of 1861 and the opening of 1863, will be almost entirely forgotten in after glory or after shame. A few will remember, but faintly and dimly, as the old veterans of the Revolution remembered in their tottering age the conflicts through which they had passed in youth, beside Washington or with Mad Anthony. A few will remember something of the truth, but only as veteran play-goers remember a performance at the Old Park in its palmy days—a Cooper or a Power prominent, but all the other actors lost in the mists of time.

When Thomas Wilson left the field of Brandywine, after that disastrous defeat, and with a bullet-hole through his neck, narrowly missing the jugular, which had been received in aiding to rescue and bear off the wounded Lafayette,—that battle-scene was so imprinted on his mind that he believed he could ever afterwards, to his dying day, recall the position of every squadron, and even the place of every rock and tree beside which he had fought; and yet when he saw him, more than half a century afterwards, hobbling along on his stout hickory cane to the place where he was to draw the scant pittance afforded him by a nation grudging in its gratitude—he remembered Lafayette and that he was wounded in helping to bear him off—nothing more. No doubt John Wilson, grandson of the old man, wounded in the assault at Fredericksburgh, came away from that murderous field with the same impression of the eternity of his own memory; but he will forget all except the very event of the action, like his grandsire. And yesterday evening, coming out from among the plaudits of the crowd that had been paying honor to the wonderful renderings of Couldock and Davidge in the "Chimney-Corner," Wetmore, the critic and habitue, did not even bring away a play-bill. That little domestic scene was so daguerreotyped upon his memory that he should never forget one detail of cast or incident—never! And yet five years hence, Wetmore will turn to some companion of the present and say: "Ah, confound it—I cannot remember! Who was it that played with Couldock at the Winter Garden, in the—the—there, hang me if I have not even forgotten the name of the piece!—that capital little Robson domestic drama—the—the—the 'Chimney Corner'?"

So much by way of explanation, if not of apology, for catching the colors of the background of general feeling at the particular period of this story, before they have time to fade. And yet a few more words with reference to that general feeling, as it took particular directions.

"Vox populi, vox Dei" is a motto so often falsified, at least in appearance, that the world has come to place but little reliance upon it; and yet it is as true to-day as when the old Latin maximist first penned it, with the plurality of the gods of his dependence fully manifest in the original "Dii" or "Deis." The people do not often err materially or long. They may throne a wooden god or a baboon for a short moment, but that moment soon passes. As a political body no demagogue with words supplying the place of brains, can long override them; and as an army they never make a favorite of a fool or a coward. The American people did not err for a moment as to where the responsibility of the sad check to the army of the Potomac did not belong; and they erred but little in their calculation of where it did. The army was brave—its leader was both careful and capable—the very man for the place: that they knew intuitively. They doubted the existence of brains at Washington, and of loyalty in many of those who had been urging "forward movements" without sufficient force or proper preparation; and they have already been fully justified in the doubt.

But the people saw something more—execrated it, howled against it, spat upon it; and after the Seven Days before Richmond, their abhorrence culminated. That terrible something was absenteeism. Thousands and tens of thousands who should have been in their places in the army, were shamelessly absent when their brothers-in-arms were being sacrificed from their very want of numbers. Wounded soldiers who had come home on furlough, and afterwards recovered, had never rejoined their commands; and in spite of the calls of McClellan no steps had been taken to force them back into the ranks. The Provost Marshals were too busy looking for summer-boarders at Fort Lafayette and Fort Warren, to think of their obvious duty of protecting the armies of the Union against indolence and desertion! A still more serious defection existed among the officers—those who had been awhile in the service, and those who had merely entered it in pretence. Half the New York regiments, especially, had originally been officered by men who had no intention of fighting, and who merely took commissions and spent a few weeks in camp or in the field of inactive operations, in order that they might have "Colonel," "Major," or "Captain" attached to their names, and be ready to make more successful plunges into the flesh-pots of well-paid offices, on the plea that they had been "patriots" and "served the country" in its need. Hundreds had come home, leaving their commands half-officered, on one pretext or another, and their leaves-of-absence obtained by more or less of political influence or favoritism. They never intended to go back; for were not the elections coming within a few months? and was it not necessary to plough the political field with those very harmless swords in order to raise a fall crop of offices?

Then the other class—those who had never intended to go at all—those who had no heart in the cause, from the first, and who had merely assumed the regulation uniform to feed vanity or the pocket. The former, to strut Broadway in unimpeachable blue-and-gold, be called by military titles, lounge at the theatres or create sensations at the watering-places, confident of being able to escape, on some pretext, before their commands (if they had any) should leave for the seat of war. The latter, to find profitable employment in raising companies, regiments or brigades, for Staten Island, East New York or the Red House, drawing pay and subsistence for twice or three times the number ever in camp, and coolly pocketing the difference! It is idle to talk, as exaggerating sensation-paragraphists sometimes do, of stealing the pennies off the eyes of a dead grandmother to play at pitch-and-toss, or forging the name of a buried father to a note and then allowing it to go to protest,—it is idle to talk of these as the extreme of criminal heartlessness: the men who could thus trade—the men who have thus traded, during the whole war—on the public patriotism and the public necessity, would deserve the lowest deep in the pit of perdition, following upon leprosy in life and deaths on dunghills—if there was not a still deeper guilt on the souls of those who first plunged the country into war and then murdered it by treason or inefficiency.[7]

[Footnote 7: January 17th, 1863.]

The public disgust at these "shoulder-straps" of both classes culminated during the first week of July. It might be unpatriotic and even cowardly to make no movement towards joining the Army of the Union: it was base and utterly contemptible to make such a movement merely as an injurious sham. So thought the people—seeing in this desire of military reputation and profit without service or sacrifice, the worm gnawing at the very heart of the republic. "If they are not soldiers, why do they wear these trappings of the battle-field?" asked the public. "If they are soldiers, why are they loitering here when their comrades are being overpowered and slaughtered?" Alas! the question has been continually asked and never answered. "Leipsic was lost, and I not there!" cried the soldier of the old French Eleventh, bursting into tears. But: "All the great battles of this war have been fought, and I have managed to keep out of them!" might the shoulder-strapped, belted, fatigue-capped, strutting mock-soldier of our own time say with a corresponding chuckle. God help us!—Rome had but one Nero fiddling when it burned, if history tells us true: we have had ten thousand military fiddlers playing away to admiring audiences during our conflagration!

Is this to be a wholesale attack, then, on our national courage? Had we no brave men, then, that only these apologies for men are exhibited? Yes!—thousand upon thousand of brave men, and hundred upon hundred of brave officers—the world over no better or truer! But they were, as they are, the men of action, not of show, or at least not of show alone.

One incident of the morning of the Second of July, when the Seven Days Battles were yet in progress before Richmond, will at once supply a few figures for this background, and an illustration of the public feeling for the soldiers of the little army of action and the great army of sham!

A few words had been permitted by the telegraph-censors to come through, and they had arrived too late for the morning papers. They were consequently bulletined. They gave some hint of the abandonment of the White House and the severe fighting which followed that movement, on Saturday and Sunday. They were not hopeful—they were discouraging—much worse, as it afterwards appeared, than the truth demanded; and the knit brows and set teeth of the readers did not show any symptoms of improvement under the new revelation.

A considerable group of men were standing about the "World" bulletin, stopping, reading and passing on—all the more slowly because the shade of the high building was refreshing in that hot, blinding, cloudless July morning sun. A group of politicians who had read the bulletins and taken their second breakfast at Crook and Duff's, were digesting the one and picking their teeth from the fragments of the other, before the door of that unaccountably-popular establishment, on the block above. Over the street from the "World" corner, at the Park fence, a dozen or two of invalid soldiers, with jaundiced faces and shabby uniforms, who had arrived by steamer from the South the day before and taken up their temporary abode in the dirty Barracks,—were standing lounging and listening to what was read from the bulletin; while a sentinel paraded up and down the walk, outside, to prevent escapes that did not seem over-probable. Voices were a little high, though not in disagreement, among the group at the corner—for they were discussing the very subject noted—that of absenteeism and military sham.

At that moment a good-looking young officer in spotless full uniform, with his cap so natty that the rain could never have been allowed to fall upon it, with his hair curled and his moustache trim as if he had been intended for any other description of "ball" than one met on the field of battle, and with a Captain's double-bars on his shoulder,—came across the Park from the direction of Broadway, over to the Beekman Street corner, as if to pass down that street. Some of the talkers noticed him, and connected him and his class a little injuriously with the events of the day. Just as he passed the corner, brushing very near some of the talkers and casting a hurried glance at the bulletin-board—one of the crowd, a rough fellow who might have belonged to the set who growled and hooted Coriolanus out of Rome,—broke out with:—

"There goes one of them, now!"

"Yes," muttered another, almost in front of the officer. "D—n 'em all! Much good those shiny uniforms are doing the country!"

The officer, who must have heard the words and known that they were intended for his ears, paid no attention and was passing on—the part of prudence and propriety, beyond a doubt. But one of the crowd was not satisfied. He must make wrong of the right (a thing very common in all causes) and the insult a personal one.

"See here!" and he laid his hand on the officer's arm, detaining him, but not roughly. "Do you see what there is on that bulletin?"

"I see!" said the Captain.

"Yes, they are cutting our boys all to pieces down there!" went on the aggrieved citizen.

"Well?" again said the officer, apparently neither angry nor frightened.

"Well!" spoke the other, repeating his word, but a little abashed by the calmness of the officer, whose arm he had let go the moment he turned to speak to him. "Well!—perhaps it is none of my business, you know—but why the d—l don't you fellows who have such handsome uniforms, and commissions, and all that sort of thing, go down and help?"

"Humph!" said the Captain, still with no symptom of being abashed or angry. "Perhaps it would be as well, for all of us who could."

"Oh, you can't go, eh?" said another member of the assemblage, in a sneering tone.

"Not yet!" was the reply of the officer.

"I thought not!" said the man who had first addressed him.

"See here, boys!" said the Captain, "haven't you made a mistake in your man? I hate a stay-at-home soldier, quite as much as you."

"Why don't you go, then?" one of the others again interrupted.

"I have been, and I am going again!" said the Captain, emphatically. "I see what is the matter. I have just put on a new uniform, and you think that looks suspicious. So it does, I suppose; but my old one has been through six pitched battles and looks rough enough to suit you."

"The d—l it has!" said the man who had addressed him. "Really, Captain, I beg your pardon!"

"Never mind that!" said the Captain. "You will probably hit the right man next time, and the quicker you shame the make-believes into doing something or pulling off their uniforms, the better. McClellan wants us all—"

"McClellan's the boy!" broke out a voice.

"You are right—'Little Mac's' the boy!" said the Captain. "He wants us all. The doctor told me this morning that I might go back, and I am going to-morrow."

"The doctor?—then you have been sick or wounded! What a fool I have been making of myself!" said the first speaker, generous as rough.

"A little!" answered the Captain, and by a dexterous movement he flung back his coat, threw open his collar and bared his neck almost to the shoulder. The whole top of the shoulder seemed to have been shot away, and the blade broken, by a ball that had struck him there and ploughed through into the neck; and the yet imperfectly healed flesh lay in torn ridges of ghastly disfigurement. Thousands of men have died from wounds of not half the apparent consequence; and yet the wearer of this was the smiling and even-tempered man of the new uniform—going back to-morrow! The world has not lost all its heroes yet; and some of them have the same fancy for a clean shirt and spotless broadcloth, when attainable, as Murat displayed for a velvet cloak, or white plume and plenty of gold embroidery on his trousers, when making the most reckless of charges at the head of the most dashing cavalry in the world. "That," said the Captain, closing up the wound as rapidly as he had opened it, but not before a general shudder had run through the crowd at its ghastly character—"that I got at Fair Oaks, three weeks ago last Sunday. How do you like it? Am I going back soon enough? Good morning, boys!"

"And your name?" asked the man who had stopped him, as he attempted to pass on. "Who are you?—Do tell us."

"Nobody that you would know," said the Captain. "My name is D——, and I belong to the Sickles Brigade."

He passed on, hurriedly, down Beekman Street, as if "Little Mac" had sent for him and he had been wasting time in going; but the cheer that went after him was joined in by the invalids at the Park fence, who had caught a part of the dialogue; and the people in the "World" office looked up from their account books, wondering what was the matter in the street; while the politicians in front of Crook and Duff's, among whom were some of the City Fathers and their backers and bottle-holders, losing the other part of the affair and only hearing the shouts, wondered whether some new notability had not just arrived at the Astor House, who could be turned to profitable use in the way of a reception in the Governor's Room, a few "Committees," gloves, carriages from Van Ranst and a dinner or two all around—of course at the expense of the economically-managed city treasury.

And this closes a chapter which has made no direct progress whatever in following the leading characters of this story, who must now be again taken up in their order.



CHAPTER X.

FOLLOWING UP THE PRINCE STREET MYSTERY—TOM LESLIE'S PECULIAR IDEAS—A CALL UPON SUPERINTENDENT KENNEDY—THE DEPARTURE OF A REGIMENT—JOSEY HARRIS IN A STREET-SQUALL—A RENCONTRE.

It was not to be supposed that Tom Leslie and Walter Lane Harding, after the expenditure of ten dollars, a whole night's rest and a considerable amount of bodily energy, in the investigation of what they called the 'Prince Street mystery,' would permit it to remain uninvestigated afterwards, so far as a little more money and a good deal more of inquisitiveness could go in unravelling it. Even before they parted, late on the night of the adventure, they had discussed half a dozen plans for gaining admission to the house on Prince Street or that on East 5—th, by fair means or foul. Harding, who was something of a stickler for propriety in ordinary cases, in spite of the fact that he had on that one occasion been inveigled into following a carriage and playing spy under a front stoop—Harding expressed himself satisfied that there being now in their minds a sufficient certainty of the existence of a disloyal organization in the city to make affidavits to that effect a duty—the proper course would be to lay the matter at once before the Superintendent of Police and request that a watch might be set upon the houses or some proceedings taken to "work up" the case for after proceedings. The young merchant no doubt had more confidence in this plan than he might otherwise have done, from the fact that a few months previous a robbery had been committed at his place of business, and that upon his laying the matter at once before the police authorities, such steps had been taken as within two weeks secured the detection of the leading culprit and the recovery of most of the missing property. Here was a detective "bridge" that had once "carried him safe over" in a commercial point of view: why would not the same bridge offer both of them a safe footing when attempting to unravel a mystery of disloyalty?

Tom Leslie, as was natural to one of his temperament, took a different view of the whole matter. Mysteries "bothered" the straight-forward Harding; but to Tom they formed one of the necessities of existence—a little less indispensable than his breakfast, but much more important than his cigar. Had he been precisely the sort of man for employing police agency where personal investigation was possible, he would never have climbed the tree in Prince Street or dragged Harding under the stoop of the brown-stone house. He suggested that Harding would not have much difficulty in making himself up for a postman, and getting inside the up-town house in that capacity, trusting to his own skill to remain within until he had made the necessary investigations; while as for himself—well, he had no particular objections to entering temporarily upon the occupation of a tinker or a gatherer of old rags and bottles, with a disguise from his friend Williams, the costumer, and working the basement of the house on Prince Street, and the domestics therein employed, in one of those capacities. He had no doubt whatever that if he could only succeed in concealing himself in the sub-cellar or the coal-vault, until the house should be closed for the night, he could then, with the aid of a few matches and a pair of list slippers carried in the pocket, make a "rummage" of the premises which must prove eminently satisfactory. He did not seem to labor under any fear that the little accident of being discovered while lying perdu or while making his explorations, and arrested and sent to Blackwell's Island as an ordinary sneak-thief, might possibly stand in the way. In fact, if all stories of his earlier life were to be credited, he had taken some pains, in more than one instance, to be arrested by the Police under what appeared to be suspicious circumstances, spend a night in the station-house, and astound the Police Justices, who personally knew him somewhat too well for their comfort, by his appearance as a very woe-begone culprit in the morning. "De gustibus non est," etc.—there is really no disputing about tastes, since St. Simeon Stylites roosted upon the top of a very inconvenient pillar, and the first ostrich inaugurated the dietary proclivities of the race by gobbling down a small cart-load of cord-wood with a garnish of a peck of paving-stones! A night in a station-house may not be so very unpleasant a thing, when taken from choice and with a certainty of the door being laughingly opened in the morning: Whiskey Tom or Scratching Sall, who visit the institution perforce, for small burglaries or big vagrancies, with a prospect of "six months" or "two years" at the end, may form a very different opinion of it!

Tom Leslie, as has been remarked, did not seem to have any fears of such a result as an arrest, to his proposed spy-movements; but it cannot be concealed that for a moment Walter Harding, who had before thought that he knew him well, looked at him out of the corners of his eyes, with some impression that he must unwittingly have been keeping company with a genteel house-breaker. At all events, Harding did not fall in with the spy-proposition, so far as his own action was concerned, alleging that there might be such a thing as a business man having other occupations than traversing the city in disguise as a volunteer detective; and so that project, if any there had really been in the mind of Leslie, was abandoned.

A resort to the police remained; for neither of the friends, after what they had seen and heard, could think of the whole affair being allowed to go by default. Superintendent Kennedy must be visited, after all; and though Harding's business for the next day would interfere, it was more than half agreed upon before they separated, that they would call together upon that official on the next day but one and lay the whole matter before him.

The agreement, though only half made, was better kept than many that are made more conclusively; for at eleven o'clock on the day named Leslie made his appearance at the place of business of Harding, and dragged him away from a series of mercantile calculations over the desk, in which he had more than half forgotten the existence of his friend as well as the whole adventure of the chase and the mystery. He came up to the work pretty readily, however—the presence of the rattling, go-ahead Leslie always having the effect of carrying him a little off his feet; and half an hour afterwards the two friends had entered that melancholy-looking five-story brick building on the corner of Broome and Elm, then and till lately known as the headquarters of the Metropolitan Police,—and were being shown by a policeman in attendance, with the blue of his suit undimmed by exposure to the weather and the brass of his buttons radiantly untarnished, into the presence of John A. Kennedy, Superintendent of the Metropolitan Police District and for the time Provost Marshal of the City of New York. They entered from the hall of the building by a side door to the left, in the rear of what had been the centre of the house when occupied as a private residence before New York moved up "above Bleecker,"—and advancing towards the front under the guidance of the respectful official, passed the table at which sat the half-bald, stern-faced, and iron-gray Deputy Superintendent Carpenter, through the door that had once separated the two parlors, and stood in the presence of another iron-gray man, seated writing at a table covered with books and papers, his back to the front of the building, and the smooth-shaven and round-faced Inspector Leonard busily examining a roll of papers behind him in the corner.

Few men in this whole country have occupied a more marked position in the public mind, during all this struggle, than Superintendent Kennedy, in his legitimate position at the head of the Police and in what we must believe to have been his illegitimate one as Provost Marshal. He made himself peculiarly conspicuous, and won the enmity of all the secession wing of the Northern democracy, by stopping the shipment of arms to the rebellious States, and blocking the apparent game of Mayor Wood and his aiders and abettors to curry favor with the extreme South by truckling to every one of its arrogant dictations. The enmity then created has never died, and can never die until those who hold it happen to die themselves. At the same time, those who were and are unconditionally loyal to the Union, have never judged the action of Superintendent Kennedy very harshly—aware that something needed to be done to prevent the existing evil, and that only a man of his indomitable "pluck" could be found to apply the remedy at such a period.

A somewhat broader and more general charge has since been preferred against him—that in the exercise of the duties of Provost Marshal, which he assumed without propriety, he showed himself a willing tool of governmental despotism and displayed indefensible harshness and arrogance. There is something of truth in this charge, beyond a question,—as the impossibility of "touching pitch" without being "defiled," applies to intercourse with wrong-doers high in power as well as to those in lower station. The station-houses of the New York police were certainly made receptacles for accused parties whose crimes were very different from those contemplated in their erection,—just as the forts in the harbors of New York and Boston have been made "Bastilles" for state-prisoners whose arrests were signally reckless and improper. Many of the prisoners, in both cases, have deserved more than all the punishment received; but the blind uncertainty as to their guilt, and the impossibility of discovering even the nature of the charges against them, have made those imprisonments equally indefensible and dangerous, and brought them at last to their end.

There is a woman at the bottom of almost every revolution—political as well as social. Tradition tells us, though history is silent on the subject, that the sad fate of the daughter of a French citizen, flung into the Bastille for alleged complicity in a conspiracy during the early days of Louis XVI., and dying there—rankled in the minds of the Parisians much more than the wrongs done to thousands of brave and noble men during the centuries previous, and furnished the burden of the terrible cry with which the men of 1789 thundered at the walls of that old fortress of feudal oppression, and with which they butchered not only De Launay, the Governor of the Bastille, but Flesselles, the Provost Marshal. The case of a woman—Mrs. Brinsmaid—was the last drop in the cup of endurance, here, and the event which we believe was finally and forever to close the melancholy doors of Lafayette and Warren, against arrest without charge and imprisonment without trial—spite of indemnity bills passed and unlimited powers conferred upon the President by a mad Congress.

Through all this, meanwhile, John A. Kennedy was unquestionably more sinned against than sinning—made the tool of worse and more unscrupulous men, who used his hard conscientiousness and his narrow bigotry of mind, fostered by too long and too close connection with the lodges of secret societies—to carry out their own designs of despotism, without the nobility to stand between him and his possible sacrifice for obeying the very orders they had given. He is not the first man who has been misused and placed in a false position, nor the last, as a later victim of blind confidence and obedience, Burnside,[8] is very likely to bear sad witness.

[Footnote 8: January 25th, 1863.]

But all this while, for the purposes of this narrative, Tom Leslie and his friend Harding have been standing unnoticed in the presence of the Superintendent. Not very long in reality—scarcely longer than enabled them to note the hair and closely-cut full beard of iron gray, the keen but troubled eyes, that had scarcely yet ceased to moisten at the memory of the loss of a dearly loved brother,[9] the face care-worn and anxious, and the shoulders bent over a little as he sat,—scarcely longer time than this was given them, when the Superintendent laid down his pen and said, sharply and decisively:

"Well, gentlemen?"

[Footnote 9: Col. William D. Kennedy, of the Tammany Regiment.]

There was nothing very cordial in the tone, and no indication that the Superintendent considered it peculiarly his place to listen to all the persons who came to him upon business; but perhaps this comparative brusquerie is necessary, in the carrying on of any important department, to discourage bores and send idle people the sooner about their business. It does not add to popularity, however, and may add materially to the opposite.

Under such circumstances, it did not need a very long period of time for Tom Leslie, with the occasional assistance of Harding, whose memory was much more accurate if not more retentive—to convey to the Superintendent the main facts of their midnight adventure, with the impression that adventure had made, of some disloyal movements going on in the City, and probably with extended ramifications elsewhere. Except to say that one of the women seen on that evening had before fallen under his notice in Europe. Leslie did not allude to the episode of the "red woman," nor did he enter into the particulars of his previous meetings with Dexter Ralston, though he asserted his knowledge of him as a Virginian of peculiar influence and a very ambiguous position. The Superintendent showed few signs of interest in the narration, though his sharp eye occasionally glanced at the face of the principal narrator, and though he two or three times made motions with the pencil lying before him, which might have been merely listless occupation of his fingers and might have been something very different.

"Well, gentlemen," said the Superintendent, when they had concluded. "It is certainly a strange story you have been telling, and of course I do not question the entire veracity of your narration of what you saw or thought you saw. But there is nothing proved, so far, that could justify any arrest, even if we could find the persons to arrest. I do not see that there is anything I could do in the matter."

"I told you so!" said Leslie in a low voice to his friend. He had opposed coming to the Superintendent at all, be it remembered.

"Nothing?—not even to set a watch upon the two houses we have named?" asked Harding, a good deal surprised and not a little out of temper.

"Humph!" answered the Superintendent. "This is not France under the Empire, and I am not Fouche."

"The latter part of that sentence may probably be true: I have my doubts about the other!" thought Tom Leslie, though he waited a more prudent occasion for communicating the thought to Harding.

"And so, Mr. Superintendent, you consider all this of no consequence?" said Harding, going back to first principles, and not by any means improving in the matter of temper.

"I did not say anything of the kind!" answered the Superintendent, his face sterner but his voice even as before. "I said there was nothing upon which I could act, and the police force of the district is scarcely sufficient to set a watch around all the houses that may happen to have traitors in them. I would advise you to say nothing of this affair to any other persons, if you have not yet done so; and if you see or hear of anything more that will seem to justify an arrest, communicate with this office again."

He did not say "good morning!" as a sign of dismissal, but his manner indicated as much, and the two friends left him with merely an additional nod. Harding was in decided dudgeon as the policeman of the bright blue cloth and the unimpeachable buttons accompanied them to the door, and muttered something very like "I'm d—d if I do communicate with that office again, in a hurry!" Leslie, who had seen more of police operations, both abroad and at home, than his friend, and who had expected little or nothing else from the first,—kept his good humor admirably; and he bored Harding, before they had walked from the office to Broadway, with the information that that was about all the thanks any man ever received for attempting to do a service to government or individuals, and a relation of how at Naples a couple of years before, he had attempted to save the life of an Englishman threatened with assassination, and been arrested and very nearly imprisoned for an attempt to stab the man himself, with his penknife or tooth-pick—he never knew precisely which!

The two friends were scarcely in the street, when the Superintendent called sharply:

"Mr. Carpenter!"

The Deputy was in the room in a moment. The Superintendent was writing a few words on a piece of paper.

"You heard the story those men were telling?"

"A part of it—perhaps all," answered the Deputy.

"There may be something in it—I think there is," continued the Superintendent. "At all events, put those two houses"—handing him the slip of paper—"under close watch, and discover who enters and who leaves them, and at what hours. Put B—— and another good man in charge of the Prince Street house, and L—— and another good man at the one in East 5— Street. That is all."

The Deputy merely bowed and returned to his own table, beckoning to one of the policemen near the door and giving the necessary orders to carry out the directions of his superior. So that almost by the time the two friends reached Broadway, and certainly some time before Leslie concluded his illustrative narration of police management in Naples, the arrangement for which they had especially come, and which had been apparently denied, was already in active operation. The reasons which had induced the Superintendent to underrate to Harding and Leslie the importance of the intelligence he had just received, or which had led to so sudden a change of mind, will probably remain a mystery even after the profounder mysteries of governmental management during the war are brought into broad daylight. There is no Sphynx like your "man in authority," whether his reasons for silence be that he does not wish others to know his intentions, or that he does not know them himself.

It was perhaps one o'clock when the two friends reached Broadway and turned downward to return to their different places of business—Harding of course to his store near the Hospital, and Leslie to his little desk in the office of the Daily Thundergust, or anywhere else in the more frequented parts of the town, where he might chance to pick up material for an item or an article. Broadway at that point and at that moment presented an appearance that used to be extraordinary, but that of late months has been almost as common as its ordinary crowded condition. One of the Eastern regiments, that had just landed at the New Haven Railroad Depot, was on its way down to the Park Barracks, and the police had been clearing the street of omnibuses and carriages to make room for them. The sidewalks on both sides were pretty well filled with spectators—idlers who never find anything better to do than gazing at street spectacles, and people of both sexes, with more or less of business on hand, who cannot avoid pausing for a moment when the police sweep by to clear the street and the tap of the bass-drum is heard,—just to see what the excitement is all about. In this instance a file of policemen extending almost from curb to curb were marching abreast to keep the way clear in front of the regiment; close behind them sounded the crashing of brass, the screaming of clarionet-reeds and the tap of drums; and a little farther behind, over the heads of the advancing column, a couple of flags caught the sun and waved softly in the light summer air—one the glorious old banner, with its three colors that blend truth, purity and devotion till death,—and the other a fringed and tasselled embroidery of dark blue silk, bearing the peculiar arms of the one State that was sending forth more of its bravest sons to do battle for all.

"A Massachusetts regiment," said Harding. "One was to come down by the New Haven Road, this morning."

"Yes," said Leslie. "You can afford half an hour more, while I can afford all day if I wish. Let us wait until the show passes." They paused accordingly and took shelter beside a lamp-post against the downward pressure of the sidewalk crowd that was coming.

Nearer came the soldiers, their long line of sloped bayonets glancing off the sunbeams with a peculiarly threatening aspect, and their equipments showing the perfection which has been accorded by the Old Bay State to all her troops, in contradistinction to the men of some of the other States, that have been allowed to go down to the conflict looking more like a mob of scarecrows than a body of trained soldiers. The Colonel, who rode first, lolled easily on his saddle, like one who had not mounted a horse for the first time when he first put on his sword-belts; the Captains of the various companies stepped out boldly and clearly in front of their men, turning occasionally to see that the line was properly kept; and the rank and file tramped on, their step almost steady enough for the march of veteran troops, and the dull thunder of the fall of each thousand of feet on the solid pavement, making the most impressive sound in the world except that supplied by the multitudinous clink of the iron hoofs of a cavalry squadron passing over the same stony road.