n
curls tossed over the arm beneath his head,--the drummer boy dreamed of
home. The last night's consultation and the morning's farewells were
lived over again in the visions of his brain; and once more his mother
visited his bedside; and again his father accompanied him to the
recruiting office. But now the recruiting office was changed into a
barber's shop, which seemed to be a tent supported by a striped pole;
where, at John Winch's suggestion, he was to have his hair trimmed to the
fighting-cut. The barber was a stiff-looking officer in epaulets, who
heated a sword red-hot in an oven, while Frank preached to him a neat
little sermon over his ration. Then the epaulets changed to a pair of
roosters with flaming red combs, that flapped their wings and crowed. And
the barber, approaching Frank with his red-hot sword, made him lie on his
back to be shaved. Then followed an excruciating sense of having his hair
pulled and his face scraped and burnt, which made him move and murmur in
his sleep; until, a ruthless attempt being made to thrust the sword up
his nostrils, he awoke.

Shouts of laughter greeted him. His companions had got up at midnight,
lighted a candle, and burnt a cork, with which they had been giving him
an artificial mustache and whiskers. He must have been a ludicrous sight,
with his countenance thus ornamented, sitting up on his bed, rubbing his
eyes open, and staring about him, while Winch and Harris shrieked with
mirth, and Ned Ellis flapped his arms and crowed.

Frank put up his hand to his head. O grief! his curls had been mangled by
dull shears in the unskilful hands of John Winch. The depredator was
still brandishing the miserable instrument, which he had borrowed for the
occasion of the fellow who cut the company's hair in the "Owl House."

Frank's sudden awaking, astonishment, and chagrin were almost too much
for him. He could have cried to think of a friend playing him such a
trick; and to think of his lost curls! But he had made up his mind to
endure every thing that might befall him with unflinching fortitude. He
must not seem weak on an occasion like this. His future standing with his
comrades might depend upon what he should say and do next. So he summoned
all his stoutness of heart, and accepted the joke as good-naturedly as
was possible under the circumstances.

"I wish you'd tell me what the fun is," he said, "so that I can laugh
too."

"Give him the looking-glass," cried Jack Winch, h