rumors for as many impromptu canards, and in their soft plantation drawl
asked which was the one paramount "ladies' man," and were assured by
every lad of the hundred that it was himself. It tells how, having heard
in advance that the more authentic one was black-haired, handsome, and
overtowering, they singled out the drum-major, were set right only by
the roaring laughter, and huddled backward like caged quails from
Kincaid's brazen smile, yet waved again as the train finally jogged on
with the band playing from the roof of the rear car,--

"I'd offer thee this hand of mine
If I could love thee less!"

To Anna that part seemed not so killingly funny or so very interesting,
but she was not one of the book's editors.

Two or three pages told of a week in camp just outside the Virginian
capital, where by day, by night, on its rocky bed sang James river; of
the business quarter, noisy with army wagons--"rattling o'er the stony
street," says the page; of colonels, generals, and statesmen by
name--Hampton, Wigfall, the fiery Toombs, the knightly Lee, the wise
Lamar; of such and such headquarters, of sentinelled warehouses, glowing
ironworks, galloping aides-de-camp and couriers and arriving and
departing columns, some as trig (almost) as Kincaid's Battery, with
their black servants following in grotesque herds along the sidewalks;
and some rudely accoutred, shaggy, staring, dust-begrimed, in baggy
butternut jeans, bearing flint-lock muskets and trudging
round-shouldered after fifes and drums that squealed and boomed out the
strains of their forgotten ancestors: "The Campbells are coming,"
"Johnnie was a piper's son," or--

"My heart is ever turning back
To the girl I left behind me."

"You should have seen the girls," laughs the book.

But there were girls not of the mountains or sand-hills, whom also you
should have seen, at battery manoeuvres or in the tulip-tree and maple
shade of proud Franklin street, or in its rose-embowered homes by night;
girls whom few could dance with, or even sit long beside in the
honeysuckle vines of their porticos, without risk of acute heart
trouble, testifies the callow volume. They treated every lad in the
battery like a lieutenant, and the "ladies' man" like a king. You should
have seen him waltz them or in quadrille or cotillon swing, balance, and
change them, their eyes brightening and feet quickening whenever the
tune became--

"Ole mahs' love' wine, ole mis' love