much for bits of finery that they thought they could turn to account in
eking out a uniform. Once it came to quite a lot of fellows getting
their mothers to ask their fathers if they would buy them some little
soldier-hats that one of the hatters had laid in, perhaps after a
muster, when he knew the boys would begin recruiting. My boy was by when
his mother asked his father, and stood with his heart in his mouth,
while the question was argued; it was decided against him, both because
his father hated the tomfoolery of the thing, and because he would not
have the child honor any semblance of soldiering, even such a feeble
image of it as a boys' company could present. But, after all, a paper
chapeau, with a panache of slitted paper, was no bad soldier-hat; it
went far to constitute a whole uniform; and it was this that the boys
devolved upon at last. It was the only company they ever really got
together, for everybody wanted to be captain and lieutenant, just as
they wanted to be clown and ring-master in a circus. I cannot understand
how my boy came to hold either office; perhaps the fellows found that
the only way to keep the company together was to take turn-about; but,
at any rate, he was marshalling his forces near his grandfather's gate
one evening when his grandfather came home to tea. The old Methodist
class-leader, who had been born and brought up a Quaker, stared at the
poor little apparition in horror. Then he caught the paper chapeau from
the boy's head, and, saying "Dear me! Dear me!" trampled it under foot.
It was an awful moment, and in his hot and bitter heart the boy, who was
put to shame before all his fellows, did not know whether to order them
to attack his grandfather in a body, or to engage him in single combat
with his own lath-sword. In the end he did neither; his grandfather
walked on into tea, and the boy was left with a wound that was sore till
he grew old enough to know how true and brave a man his grandfather was
in a cause where so many warlike hearts wanted courage.

It was already the time of the Mexican war, when that part of the West
at least was crazed with a dream of the conquest which was to carry
slavery wherever the flag of freedom went. The volunteers were mustered
in at the Boy's Town; and the boys, who understood that they were real
soldiers, and were going to a war where they might get killed, suffered
a disappointment from the plain blue of their uniform and the simplicity
of th