"'Your name and Regiment, sir?'

"Tom drawled them out, and the General directed his Aid to take them
down.

"'Go to your Quarters, sir,' said the General.

"'Havn't caught anything yet, and hard tack is played out,' replied Tom.

"At this the General put spurs to his horse, and left. Half an hour
afterward, a Corporal's Guard came after Tom. They took him up to the
marquee of the Surgeon of the Division. Tom played it just as well
there, and yesterday his discharge came down, all O.K., and they've got
the Commissary on the strength of it, and are having a high old time
generally."

"Bully boy with a glass eye! How are _you_, discharge!" and like slang
exclamations broke rapidly and rapturously from the crowd.

"But," said one of the more thoughtful of the crowd, as the condition of
a brother then lying hopelessly ill, with no prospect of a
discharge,--although it had been promised repeatedly for months
past,--pressed itself upon his attention, "how shameful that this
able-bodied coward and idler should get off in this way, when so many
better men are dying by inches in the hospitals. A General who
understood his command and had more knowledge of human nature, could not
be deceived in that way."

"Tom had lounged about Divisions Head-Quarters so much, that he knew old
Pigey thoroughly, and just when to take him," said a comrade.

"All the greater shame that our Generals can be taken off their guard at
any time," retorted the other.

"Oh, well," continued he, "about what might be expected of one educated
exclusively as a Topographical Engineer, and having no acquaintance with
active field service, and with no talent for command; for it is a talent
that West Point may educate, but cannot create."

"And what is a Tippo, Typo, or Toppographical Engineer, Sergeant?" broke
in the little Irish Corporal, who chanced to be one of the group, rather
seriously. "Isn't it something like a land surveyor; and be Jabers,
wasn't the great Washington himself a land surveyor? Eh? Maybe that's
the rayson these Tippos, Typos, or Toppographical Engineers ride such
high horses."

"Not badly thought of, Corporal," replied the Sergeant, amid laughter at
Terence's discovery, and his attempt at pronunciation; "but Washington
was a man of earnestness and ability, and not a guzzler of whiskey, and
a mouther of indecent profanity. There are good officers in that Corps.
There is Meade, the fighter of the noble Pennsylvania Reserves; Warr