aporing on the top of a dovecote.

There is a kind of valorous spleen which, like wind, is apt to grow unruly
in the stomachs of newly-made soldiers, compelling them to box-lobby
brawls and brokenheaded quarrels, unless there can be found some more
harmless way to give it vent. It is recorded, in the delectable romance of
Pierce Forest, that a young knight, being dubbed by King Alexander, did
incontinently gallop into an adjacent forest, and belabor the trees with
such might and main, that he not merely eased off the sudden effervescence
of his valor, but convinced the whole court that he was the most potent
and courageous cavalier on the face of the earth. In like manner the
commander of Fort Casimir, when he found his martial spirit waxing too hot
within him, would sally forth into the fields and lay about him most
lustily with his sabre; decapitating cabbages by platoons; hewing down
lofty sunflowers, which he termed gigantic Swedes; and if, perchance, he
espied a colony of big-bellied pumpkins quietly basking in the sun, "Ah!
caitiff Yankees!" would he roar, "have I caught ye at last?" So saying,
with one sweep of his sword, he would cleave the unhappy vegetables from
their chins to their waist-bands; by which warlike havoc, his choler being
in some sort allayed, he would return into the fortress with the full
conviction that he was a very miracle of military prowess.

He was a disciplinarian, too, of the first order. Woe to any unlucky
soldier who did not hold up his head and turn out his toes when on parade;
or who did not salute the general in proper style as he passed. Having one
day, in his Bible researches, encountered the history of Absalom and his
melancholy end, the general bethought him that, in a country abounding
with forests, his soldiers were in constant risk of a like catastrophe; he
therefore, in an evil hour, issued orders for cropping the hair of both
officers and men throughout the garrison.

Now so it happened, that among his officers was a sturdy veteran named
Keldermeester, who had cherished, through a long life, a mop of hair not a
little resembling the shag of a Newfoundland dog, terminating in a queue
like the handle of a frying-pan, and queued so tightly to his head that
his eyes and mouth generally stood ajar, and his eyebrows were drawn up to
the top of his forehead. It may naturally be supposed that the possessor
of so goodly an appendage would resist with abhorrence an order condemning