It was under Montgomery that Philip Winwood took service, enlisting as a private soldier, but soon revealing such knowledge of military matters that he was speedily, in the off-hand manner characteristic of improvised armies, made a lieutenant.  This was a little strange, seeing that there was a mighty scramble for commissions, nine out of every ten patriots, however raw, clamouring to be officers; and it shows that sometimes (though ’tis not often) modest merit will win as well as self-assertive incompetence.  Philip had obtained his acquaintance with military forms from books; he was, in his ability to assimilate the matter of a book, an exception among men; and a still greater exception in his ability to apply that matter practically.  Indeed, it sometimes seemed that he could get out of a book not only all that was in it, but more than was in it.  Many will not believe what I have related of him, that he had actually learned the rudiments of fencing, the soldier’s manual of arms, the routine of camp and march, and such things, from reading; but it is a fact:  just as it is true that Greene, the best general of the rebels after Washington, learned military law, routine, tactics, and strategy, from books he read at the fire of the forge where he worked as blacksmith; and that the men whom he led to Cambridge, from Rhode Island, were the best disciplined, equipped, uniformed, and maintained, of the whole Yankee army at that time.  As for Philip’s gift of translating printed matter into actuality, I remember how, when we afterward came to visit strange cities together, he would find his way about without a question, like an old resident, through having merely read descriptions of the places.

But rank did not come unsought, or otherwise, to Philip’s fellow volunteer from the Faringfield house, Mr. Cornelius.  The pedagogue, with little to say on the subject, took the rebel side as a matter of course, Presbyterians being, it seems, republican in their nature.  He went as a private in the same company with Philip.

It was planned that the rebel troops of New York province should invade Canada by way of Lake George, while the army under Washington continued the siege of Boston.  Philip went through the form of arranging that his wife should remain at her father’s house—­the only suitable home for her, indeed—­during his absence in the field; and so, in the Summer of 1775, upon a day much like that in which he had first come to us twelve years before, it was ours to wish him for a time farewell.

Mr. Faringfield and his lady, with Fanny and Tom, stood in the hall, and my mother and I had joined them there, when Philip came down-stairs in his new blue regimentals.  He wore his sword, but it was not his wife that had buckled it on.  There had been no change in her manner toward him:  he was still to her but as a strange guest in the house, rather to be disdained than treated with the courtesy due even to a strange guest.  We all asked ourselves