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- tastes of one’s friends, you know.’ Here, suddenly reminded that an
immediate courtesy was due. ‘Of course, my good sir, you will join us.
Nay, I insist upon it. Not good for a man to be alone, especially on the
immortal Fourth. Tobias, come back. Tut, he’s gone. William! Go, say we
will dine at the round table in the south-west corner, and let there be
four covers--four, mind.’
Even so, Major, or much so, on the last Fourth, sitting in the club
parlour didst thou by turns ruminate and expatiate, and humorously rail
and feelingly evoke the bygone and glow as in the poetic fervour of
youth, and involuntarily sigh the sigh of old philosophy, till in the
end the home-sense of the eternal sagacity of all things did but result
in awakening in thee but the more vividly thy relish for life and the
_Chambertin_.
But on the forenoon of each thirtieth of May, seated--minus the
aforesaid historic decoration--in thy reserved corner of the club
balcony, in graven sort thou lookest down on the floral march of the
_Grand Army_. Then seemed thou even less intent on returning the
greetings from some hale comrade in the ranks, or less hearty hero borne
along in open barouche; less dwelling, too, on the processional wains of
nodding flowers, followed close by nodding plumes of the escort--to thee
and the other veterans--a new generation of Mars--less absorbed by all
this, than musing on the many mounds those same flowers ere nightfall
shall dress. Thy constitutional good spirits seem strangely overcast
that day. Thou forgoest the banquet. Nevertheless, it is observable that
in the balcony thy empty sleeve is disposed more picturesquely, nay,
somehow more conspicuously on that aforesaid thirtieth of every May,
than on any other morning of the year. It more catches the eye. Now and
then, during pauses in the procession, the crowd on the sidewalk below
glance up at it, and expressively, and thou turnest not aside.
‘Ah, Major,’ I said, ‘I love thee; yes, and it is as much for thy queer
little human foibles as thy not-so-common virtues. Come now, for all thy
annual megrims, prouder art thou of that empty sleeve of thine than even
of thy grandfather’s Revolutionary insignia, for _this_ thou didst but
inherit, the other, conferred on thee at first hand, and by the God of
Battles.’
Not often dost thou discuss the tactics of thy Virginia campaigns, but
what things hast thou told us of its byplay--the scouting, the foraging,
the riding up to lovely mansions garrisoned by a faithful old slave or
two, servants to lovely damsels more terrible than Mars in their
feminine indignation at the insolent invader; in other instances being
coquettishly served at an improvised lunch on some broad old piazza by
less implacable beauties reduced by the calamities to dispensing
hospitality for the enemy’s greenbacks. In such and similar passages of
the war thou aboundest, passages luckily not susceptible of being
formalised into professed history.
But the better for the felicity of thy friends, thou hast more than one
string to thy harp, Major. Did any listener ever tire of thy
reminiscences of European travel? What signifies that they date so far
back, before some of us were born? Even so do sundry inestimable
vintages in the Club’s cellar. Pleasant it is when weary of the
never-ending daily news, the same sort of thing forever, how pleasant to
be spirited back by a tale, by some veteran’s living voice and eloquent
gestures, to a period that is no news at all, a time prior to those more
pronounced changes which have come over so few portions of that ancient
and manifold world across the Atlantic, a world to which we are bound by
unsunderable ties of genealogy.
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