f the business; meaning
thereby, guard mounting every morning and Sunday morning, inspection
once a week, making an average of, say, twenty minutes work per diem for
the adjutant, and leaving the poor sergeant-major enough to occupy and
worry him for ten or eleven hours. 'Sergeant-major, publish these
orders,' Lieutenant Harch would say, in tones of authority exceeding in
peremptory curtness anything I have ever heard since from the commander
of a grand army; and then, scraping a match--my match--upon the wall, he
would begin attending to his 'military duties' by lighting a cigar--my
cigar--and strolling up the avenue, on exhibition, preparatory to going
home to dine, while the fag remained driving the pen madly, kindly
assisted sometimes by Quartermaster-Sergeant Oates, until long after the
dinner hour of the non-commissioned staff. I think the company
commanders must sometimes have doubted (unless they carefully refrained
from reading orders, as I have sometimes thought probable) whether the
adjutant could write his name; for all our orders used to be signed:

'By order of Major JOHNSON HEAVYSTERNE:
FREDERICK HARCH, 1st Lieutenant and Adjutant,
By WILLIAM JENKINS, Sergeant-Major.'

Now, if the printer sets this up properly, you will see that, even at
that early day, we knew too much to adopt the sensation style of signing
orders which some officers have since learned from the _New York
Herald_, thus:

By command of
Major-General BULGER!
WASHINGTON SMITH, A. A.-G.

In those days there was but little of that distinction of ranks which
has come to be better observed now that our volunteers have grown into
an army. You see, the process of forming an army out of its constituent
element follows pretty much the fashion set by that complex machine the
human animal: the materials go through all the processes of swallowing,
digestion, chylifaction, chymifaction, absorption, alteration, and
excretion; bone, muscle, nerve, sinew, viscera, and what not, each
taking its share, and discarding the useless material that has only
served, like bran in horse feed, to give volume and _prehensibility_ to
the mass. Our non-commissioned staff messed with the major, who was as
jolly a bachelor as need be, of some forty-nine years of growth, and
thirty of butchering, that