on, who thinks to be ugly is to
be good, who is by temperament and education unfit to enjoy anything,
while Thomas Langdon, who by the same measurements is fit to enjoy
everything, is left here to hold back the Army of the Potomac. It's
undoubtedly a tribute to my valor, but I don't like it."

"Thomas," said Colonel Leonidas Talbot, gravely, "you're entirely too
severe with our worthy young friend, Dalton. The bubbles of pleasure
always lie beneath austere and solemn exteriors like his, seeking to
break a way to the surface. The longer the process is delayed the more
numerous the bubbles are and the greater they expand. If scandalous
reports concerning a certain young man in Richmond should reach us here
in the North, relating his unparalleled exploits in the giddier circles
of our gay capital, I should know without the telling that it was our
prim young George Dalton."

"You never spoke truer words, Leonidas," said Lieutenant-Colonel Hector
St. Hilaire. "A little judicious gallantry in youth is good for any one.
It keeps the temperature from going too high. I recall now the case of
Auguste Champigny, who owned an estate in Louisiana, near the Louisiana
estate of the St. Hilaires, and the estates of those cousins of mine whom
I visited, as I told you once.

"But pardon me. I digress, and to digress is to grow old, so I will not
digress, but remain young, in heart at least. I go back now. I was
speaking of Auguste Champigny, who in youth thought only of making money
and of making his plantation, already great, many times greater. The
blood in his veins was old at twenty-two. He did not love the vices that
the world calls such. But yet there were times, I knew, when he would
have longed to go with the young, because youth cannot be crushed
wholly at twenty-two. There was no escape of the spirits, no wholesome
blood-letting, so to speak, and that which was within him became corrupt.
He acquired riches and more riches, and land and more land, and at fifty
he went to New Orleans, and sought the places where pleasures abound.
But his true blossoming time had passed. The blood in his veins now
became poison. He did the things that twenty should do, and left undone
the things that fifty should do. Ah! Harry, one of the saddest things
in life is the dissipated boy of fifty! He should have come with us when
the first blood of youth was upon him. He could have found time then for
play as well as work. He coul