que, with singularly well shaped hands and feet and a
head and face that were almost too good-looking to be manly. Dark hazel
eyes, dark brown hair, eyebrows, lashes, and a very heavy drooping
moustache, a straight nose, a soft, sensitive mouth with even white
teeth that were, however, rarely visible, a clear-cut chin, and with it
all a soft, almost languid Southern intonation, musical, even
ultra-refined, and he shrank like a woman from a coarse word or the
utterance of an impure thought. He was a man whom many women admired, of
whom some were afraid, whom many liked and trusted, for he could not be
bribed to say a mean thing about one of their number, though he would
sometimes be satirical to her very face. It was among the men that Sam
Waring was hated or loved,--loved, laughed over, indulged, even spoiled,
perhaps, to any and every extent, by the chosen few who were his chums
and intimates, and absolutely hated by a very considerable element that
was prominent in the army in those queer old days,--the array of
officers who, by reason of birth, antecedents, lack of education or of
social opportunities, were wanting in those graces of manner and
language to which Waring had been accustomed from earliest boyhood. His
people were Southerners, yet, not being slave-owners, had stood firm for
the Union, and were exiled from the old home as a natural consequence in
a war in which the South held all against who were not for her.
Appointed a cadet and sent to the Military Academy in recognition of the
loyalty of his immediate relatives, he was not graduated until the war
was practically over, and then, gazetted to an infantry regiment, he was
stationed for a time among the scenes of his boyhood, ostracized by his
former friends and unable to associate with most of the war-worn
officers among whom his lot was cast. It was a year of misery, that
ended in long and dangerous illness, his final shipment to Washington on
sick-leave, and then a winter of keen delight, a social campaign in
which he won fame, honors, friends at court, and a transfer to the
artillery, and then, joining his new regiment, he plunged with eagerness
into the gayeties of city life. The blues were left behind with the cold
facings of his former corps, and hope, life, duty, were all blended in
hues as roseate as his new straps were red. It wasn't a month before all
the best fellows in the batteries swore by Sam Waring and all the
others at him, so that where th