gratulation, as he passed out of sight: "There! you are quits with those
maimed soldiers at last, and you have a country which you have paid for
with cold victuals as they with blood."

We have been a good deal visited by one disbanded volunteer, not to the
naked eye maimed, nor apparently suffering from any lingering illness, yet
who bears, as he tells me, a secret disabling wound in his side from a
spent shell, and who is certainly a prey to the most acute form of
shiftlessness. I do not recall with exactness the date of our
acquaintance, but it was one of those pleasant August afternoons when a
dinner eaten in peace fills the digester with a millennial tenderness for
the race too rarely felt in the nineteenth century. At such a moment it is
a more natural action to loosen than to tighten the purse-strings, and
when a very neatly dressed young man presented himself at the gate, and,
in a note of indescribable plaintiveness, asked if I had any little job
for him to do that he might pay for a night's lodging, I looked about the
small domain with a vague longing to find some part of it in disrepair,
and experienced a moment's absurd relief when he hinted that he would be
willing to accept fifty cents in pledge of future service. Yet this was
not the right principle: some work, real or apparent, must be done for the
money, and the veteran was told that he might weed the strawberry bed,
though, as matters then stood, it was clean enough for a strawberry bed
that never bore anything. The veteran was neatly dressed, as I have said:
his coat, which was good, was buttoned to the throat for reasons that
shall be sacred against curiosity, and he had on a perfectly clean paper
collar; he was a handsome young fellow, with regular features, and a
solicitously kept imperial and mustache; his hair, when he lifted his hat,
appeared elegantly oiled and brushed. I did not hope from this figure that
the work done would be worth the money paid, and, as nearly as I can
compute, the weeds he took from that bed cost me a cent apiece, to say