feet in his shoes. "But I've growed a
heap since," said the old hero.

He introduced me to his wife, a slow, somewhat melancholy old lady, in
ill health. "She has been poorly now for a good many years." They have
no children.

At my request he told me his story. He is of Scotch parentage; and who
knows but he may be akin to the ploughman-poet whose "arrowy songs still
sing in our morning air"? He was born and bred in Burlington, New
Jersey. A shoemaker by trade, he became a soldier by choice, and fought
the British in what used to be the "last war." I am afraid he contracted
bad habits in the army. For some years after the war he led a wandering
and dissipated life. Forty years ago he chanced to find himself in
Gettysburg, where he married and settled down. But his unfortunate
habits still adhered to him, and he was long looked upon as a man of
little worth. At last, however, when there seemed to be no hope of his
ever being anything but a despised old man, he took a sudden resolution
to reform. The fact that he kept that resolution, and still keeps it so
strictly that it is impossible to prevail upon him to taste a drop of
intoxicating liquor, attests a truly heroic will. He was afterwards a
constable in Gettysburg, in which capacity he served some six years.

On the morning of the first day's fight he sent his wife away, telling
her that he would take care of the house. The firing was near by, over
Seminary Ridge. Soon a wounded soldier came into the town and stopped at
an old house on the opposite corner. Burns saw the poor fellow lay down
his musket, and the inspiration to go into the battle seems then first
to have seized him. He went over and demanded the gun.

"What are you going to do with it?" asked the soldier.

"I'm going to shoot some of the damned Rebels!" replied John.

He is not a swearing man, and the strong adjective is to be taken in a
strictly literal, not a profane, sense.

Having obtained the gun, he pushed out on the Chambersburg Pike, and was
soon in the thick of the skirmish.

"I wore a high-crowned hat, and a long-tailed blue; and I was seventy
years old."

The sight of so old a man, in such costume, rushing fearlessly forward
to get a shot in the very front of the battle, of course attracted
attention. He fought with the Seventh Wisconsin Regiment, the Colonel of
which ordered him back, and questioned him, and finally, seeing the old
man's patriotic determination, gave him a good rifl