“Is this the 53d?” he quavered to the nearest soldier

“It certainly is!” some one answered.  “Come and join us, veteran!”

“Is Tom—­Tom Fragini here?”

The answer came from a big soldier, who sprang to his feet and leaped toward the old man.

“It’s grandfather, as I live!” he called out, kissing the veteran on both cheeks.  “I saw sister in town, and she said you’d be at the gate as we marched by.”

“Didn’t wait at no gate!  Marched right up to you!” said grandfather.  “Marched up with my uniform and medal on!  Stand off there, Tom, so I can see you.  My word!  You’re bigger’n your father, but not bigger’n I was!  No, sir, not bigger’n I was in my day before that wound sort o’ bent me over.  They say it’s the lead in the blood.  I’ve still got the bullet!”

The old man’s trousers were threadbare but well darned, and the holes in the uppers of his shoes were carefully patched.  He had a merry air of optimism, which his grandson had inherited.

“Well, Tom, how much longer you got to serve?” asked grandfather.

“Six months,” answered Tom.

“One, two, three, four—­” grandfather counted the numbers off on his fingers.  “That’s good.  You’ll be in time for the spring ploughing.  My, how you have filled out!  But, somehow, I can’t get used to this kind of uniform.  Why, I don’t see how a girl’d be attracted to you fellows, at all!”

“They have to, for we’re the only kind of soldiers there are nowadays.  Not as gay as in your day, that’s sure, when you were in the Hussars, eh?”

“Yes, I was in the Hussars—­in the Hussars!  I tell you, with our sabres a-gleaming, our horses’ bits a-jingling, our pennons a-flying, and all the color of our uniform—­I tell you, the girls used to open their eyes at us.  And we went into the charge like that—­yes, sir, just that gay and grand, Colonel Galland leading!”

Military history said that it had been a rather foolish charge, a fine example of the vainglory of unreasoning bravery that accomplishes nothing, but no one would suggest such scepticism of an immortal event in popular imagination in hearing of the old man as he lived over that intoxicated rush of horses and men into a battery of the Grays.

“Well, didn’t you find what I said was true about the lowlanders?” asked grandfather after he had finished the charge, referring to the people of the southern frontier of the Browns, where the 53d had just been garrisoned.

“No, I kind of liked them.  I made a lot of friends,” admitted Tom.  “They’re very progressive.”

“Eh? eh?  You’re joking!” To like the people of the southern frontier was only less conceivable than liking the people of the Grays.  “That’s because you didn’t see deep under them.  They’re all on the outside—­a flighty lot!  Why, if they’d done their part in that last war we’d have licked the Grays until they cried for mercy!  If their army corps had stood its ground at Volmer—­”