“Ercildoune.”

“Hey?”

“Ercildoune.”

“Jemime!  Ercildoune,—­from Philadelphia, you say?”

“Yes,—­do you know him?”

“Well, no,—­I don’t exactly know him, but I think I know something about him.  His pa’s rich as a nob, if it’s the one I mean,”—­and then finished sotto voce, “it’s Mrs. Surrey’s brother, sure as a gun!”

“Well, he ought to be rich, if he ain’t.  As we, that’s the Captain and me, were walking away, the Captain said to one of the officers of the Fifty-fourth who’d been listening to the talk, ’It’s easy for that man to preach self-denial for a principle.  He’s rich, I’ve heard.  It don’t hurt him any; but it’s rather selfish to hold some of the rest up to his standard; and I presume that such a man as he has no end of influence with them!’

“‘As he should,’ said his officer.  ’Ercildoune has brains enough to stock a regiment, and refinement, and genius, and cultivation that would assure him the highest position in society or professional life anywhere out of America.  He won’t leave it though; for in spite of its wrongs to him he sees its greatness and goodness,—­says that it is his, and that it is to be saved, it and all its benefits, for Americans,—­no matter what the color of their skin,—­of whom he is one.  He sees plain enough that this war is going to break the slave’s chain, and ultimately the stronger chain of prejudice that binds his people to the grindstone, and he’s full of enthusiasm for it, accordingly; though I’m free to confess, the magnanimity of these colored men from the North who fight, on faith, for the government, is to me something amazing.’”

“‘Why,’ said the Captain,—­’why, any more from the North than from the South?’”

“Why? the blacks down here can at least fight their ex-masters, and pay off some old scores; but for a man from the North who is free already, and so has nothing to gain in that way,—­whose rights as a man and a citizen are denied,—­for such a man to enlist and to fight, without bounty, pay, honor, or promotion,—­without the promise of gaining anything whatever for himself,—­condemned to a thankless task on the one side,—­to a merciless death or even worse fate on the other,—­facing all this because he has faith that the great republic will ultimately be redeemed; that some hands will gather in the harvest of this bloody sowing, though he be lying dead under it,—­I tell you, the more I see of these men, the more I know of them, the more am I filled with admiration and astonishment.

“Now here’s this one of whom we are talking, Ercildoune, born with a silver spoon in his mouth:  instead of eating with it, in peace and elegance, in some European home, look at him here.  You said something about his lack of self-sacrifice.  He’s doing ’what he is from a principle; and beyond that, it’s no wonder the men care for him:  he has spent a small fortune on the most needy of them since they enlisted,—­finding out which of them have families, or any one dependent on them, and helping them in the finest and most delicate way possible.  There are others like him here, and it’s a fortunate circumstance, for there’s not a man but would suffer, himself,—­and, what’s more, let his family suffer at home,—­before he’d give up the idea for which they are contending now.”