old
Harbour--name of frightful memory!--and when the enemy had swarmed out
of their intrenchments and swept back the whole line just beyond him,
his battery had stood like a cape in a storm-beaten ocean, attacked on
two sides at once; and for the half-hour that elapsed before infantry
support came up, the Colonel had ridden slowly up and down his line,
repeating in calm and godly accents, "Give 'em hell, boys--give 'em
hell!"--The Colonel's hand trembled now as he held it out, and his
voice was shrill and cracked as he told what pleasure it gave him to
meet General Montague's son.

"Why have we never seen you before?" asked Major Thorne. Montague
replied that he had spent all his life in Mississippi--his father
having married a Southern woman after the war. Once every year the
General had come to New York to attend the reunion of the Loyal Legion
of the State; but some one had had to stay at home with his mother,
Montague explained.

There were perhaps a hundred men in the room, and he was passed about
from group to group. Many of them had known his father intimately. It
seemed almost uncanny to him to meet them in the body; to find them old
and feeble, white-haired and wrinkled. As they lived in the chambers of
his memory, they were in their mighty youth-heroes, transfigured and
radiant, not subject to the power of time.

Life on the big plantation had been a lonely one, especially for a
Southern-born man who had fought in the Union army. General Montague
had been a person of quiet tastes, and his greatest pleasure had been
to sit with his two boys on his knees and "fight his battles o'er
again." He had collected all the literature of the corps which he had
commanded--a whole library of it, in which Allan had learned to find
his way as soon as he could read. He had literally been brought up on
the war--for hours he would lie buried in some big illustrated history,
until people came and called him away. He studied maps of campaigns and
battle-fields, until they became alive with human passion and struggle;
he knew the Army of the Potomac by brigade and division, with the names
of commanders, and their faces, and their ways-until they lived and
spoke, and the bare roll of their names had power to thrill him.--And
now here were the men themselves, and all these scenes and memories
crowding upon him in tumultuous throngs. No wonder that he was a little
dazed, and could hardly find words to answer when he was spoken to.