Now the historians, as is their wont, have pictured Greene the general to the complete effacement of Greene the man, and it is in my mind that you may like to see the new commander as we saw him, making his first inspection of Horatio Gates’s poor “shadow of an army” on that dismal December day in Charlotte.

In years he was rising forty; and as weight goes he was a heavy man, pressing hard upon fifteen stone with the knuckle of it under his waistcoat.  None the less, though his great bulk made him sit his horse more like a farmer than a soldier, he had the muscular shoulders and arms of the anchor-smiths, to which trade he had been bred.

The hint of grossness which his figure gave was not borne out by his face.  Like my Lord Cornwallis’s, his eyes were womanish large, and nose and mouth and the lift of the brow were cast in a mold to match; yet there was that in his face which made it the mask of a soul thoughtful and serene; and his ruddy complexion and fair hair gave him a look of openness that a dark man is like to miss.

A skilled soldier, with a good promise of strenuous patience, was my summing up of him, and Dick saw him as I did, though with a more prophetic eye.

“He will make his mark, Jack, look you; not in stubborn in-fighting at the barrier, mayhap, like Dan Morgan, nor in a brilliant dash, like our colonel, but in his own anchor-smith’s way—­a heat at a time, and a blow at a time,” said Jennifer; and I nodded.

Stirrup to stirrup with the new commander as he passed down the line rode Daniel Morgan, big, strong, masterful, handsome, the very pick and choice of leaders for his rough and ready riflemen.  Like most of his men, he scorned to wear a uniform, appearing on parade, as in the field, in a neat-fitting hunting-shirt of Indian-tanned buckskin with fringings of the same—­a costume that set off his gigantic figure as no tailor-fine coat could have set it off.

When he pulled his horse down to make it keep step with the sedater pacings of the general’s, we could hear him declaring, with an oath, that his Eleventh Virginia alone would give a good account of all the Tories between the Catawba and the Broad; and when the cavalcade passed the rifle corps, the men flung their hats and cheered their leader in open defiance of all discipline.

Ah me! they tell me that in after years this stout Daniel, the “Lion-bearder,” as we used to dub him, became a doddering old man, even as thy old tale-teller is now; that he put off all his roistering ways and might be found any Lord’s Day shouting, not curses, as of yore, but psalm tunes, in the church whereof he was a pillar!  But ’twas the other Daniel we knew; the bluff, hearty man of his two hands, who could pummel the best boxer in his own regiment of fisticuffers; who could out-curse, out-buffet and out-drink the hardiest frontiersman on the border.