kindly, sorely-tried ruler—­the Democritus of his grisly epoch.  The Caribees excite none of the sensation here they have been accustomed to.  The streets are not crowded, and the few civilians passing hardly turn their heads.  Mounted orderlies dash hurriedly, with hideous clatter of sabre and equipments, across the line of march, through the very regiment’s ranks, answering with a disdainful oath or mocking gibe when an outraged shoulder-strap raised a remonstrating voice.  At Fourteenth Street the Caribees were halted until the colonel could take his bearings from headquarters, just around the corner.  The wide sidewalks were dense with bestarred and epauleted personages in various keys of discussion.  Jack and his crony, Barney Moore, studied the scene in wonder.  Their company was halted exactly at the corner of Fourteenth Street and Pennsylvania Avenue, and the two were standing at Willard’s corner.

“I wonder if the President just stands and throws the stars down from that balcony?” Jack said, as the crowd of brigadiers thickened before the hotel door.  “What on earth are they all doing here?”

“Oh, they come to make requisition on General Bacchus; he’s the commissary-general of the brigadiers—­don’t you know?” Barney said, innocently.

“General Bacchus?  Barney, you’re crazy—­there’s no such officer in the army—­I know all the names—­you mean General Banks, don’t you?”

“Oh, no, I’m not mistaken—­General Bacchus has been selected to deal out the esprit de corps!”

“L’esprit de corps?  Barney, you’re certainly tipsy.  I’m ashamed of you!”

“Yes, the spirit of that corps, as you can tell from the whiffs that come this way, is the whisky-bottle.  Bacchus presides over that spirit.  One would think you’d never read an eclogue of Virgil—­you’re duller than a doctor of divinity’s after-dinner speech!  A tutor’s joke is the utmost wit you ought to bear.”

“And so you call that a joke?”

“Well, it isn’t a cough, a song, an oath, or—­or anything old Oswald would say, so it must be a joke.”

“Well, in that sense it may pass, like a tipsy soldier without the countersign.”

“Oh, come now, Jack, these stars are really dazzling you!”

“Not but I’ll make you see some that will dazzle you, if you don’t treat your superior more respectfully.”

“Oh, the punch you think of giving me wouldn’t solve this star problem; it requires to be made in the old—­the milky way.”

But Barney’s astral jokes were brought to a period by the sharp note of the bugle, as Colonel Oswald, very important under the eye of so many big-wigs, magnificently ordered the march.  The regiment passed up the steep hill, out Fourteenth Street—­then a red clay thoroughfare of sticky mire with only here and there a negro’s shanty where the palaces of the rich rise to-day.  The men learned something of their future enemy, Virginia mud, as they climbed