y of action and the great army of
sham!

A few words had been permitted by the telegraph-censors to come through,
and they had arrived too late for the morning papers. They were
consequently bulletined. They gave some hint of the abandonment of the
White House and the severe fighting which followed that movement, on
Saturday and Sunday. They were not hopeful--they were discouraging--much
worse, as it afterwards appeared, than the truth demanded; and the knit
brows and set teeth of the readers did not show any symptoms of
improvement under the new revelation.

A considerable group of men were standing about the "World" bulletin,
stopping, reading and passing on--all the more slowly because the shade
of the high building was refreshing in that hot, blinding, cloudless
July morning sun. A group of politicians who had read the bulletins and
taken their second breakfast at Crook and Duff's, were digesting the one
and picking their teeth from the fragments of the other, before the door
of that unaccountably-popular establishment, on the block above. Over
the street from the "World" corner, at the Park fence, a dozen or two of
invalid soldiers, with jaundiced faces and shabby uniforms, who had
arrived by steamer from the South the day before and taken up their
temporary abode in the dirty Barracks,--were standing lounging and
listening to what was read from the bulletin; while a sentinel paraded
up and down the walk, outside, to prevent escapes that did not seem
over-probable. Voices were a little high, though not in disagreement,
among the group at the corner--for they were discussing the very subject
noted--that of _absenteeism and military sham_.

At that moment a good-looking young officer in spotless full uniform,
with his cap so natty that the rain could never have been allowed to
fall upon it, with his hair curled and his moustache trim as if he had
been intended for any other description of "ball" than one met on the
field of battle, and with a Captain's double-bars on his shoulder,--came
across the Park from the direction of Broadway, over to the Beekman
Street corner, as if to pass down that street. Some of the talkers
noticed him, and connected him and his class a little injuriously with
the events of the day. Just as he passed the corner, brushing very near
some of the talkers and casting a hurried glance at the
bulletin-board--one of the crowd, a rough fellow who might have belonged
to the set who growled and h