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It was a poor, cheap-looking, tarnished silver medal, a half-dollar once, undoubtedly, beaten out roughly into the shape of a heart and engraved in script by the jeweller of some country town.
Here we found ourselves in a large low room containing some thirty or forty tables, and fitted up after the universal restaurant pattern, with cheap-looking glasses, rows of hooks, and spittoons in due number. The air was heavy with the combined smells of many dinners, and noisy with the clatter of many tongues.
While in one corner, behind one of the reading desks, was a cheap-looking harmonium. Here and there, upon the rough walls, were nailed cardboard streamers, conveying, amid a wealth of illumination, sundry appropriate texts of a non-committal religious flavor, and down the narrow body of the building were stretched rows of hard-seated, hard-backed benches for the accommodation of the congregation.
"Yes, sir; I saw those buffaloes coming over the hill, and as we were about out of fresh meat I thought I would go and get some," said I. They scanned my cheap-looking outfit pretty closely, and as my horse was not very prepossessing in appearance, having on only a blind bridle, and otherwise looking like a work horse, they evidently considered me a green hand at hunting.
But I don't think it would, and I don't think that they were going to stand up, anyway. They just went on eating. I noticed one cheap-looking young man watching Uncle with a sort of half smile as he moved towards his seat. I heard him say to his neighbour, "Some scout, eh?" The food was so plain and so greasy that I could hardly eat it.
In another minute he and the editor, and the poor cheap-looking brown paper parcel, were gone. The others followed them out, and I was left in the hall alone. Oh, Public! Public! it all depends now upon you!
As I neared them I saw that they were officers, newly arrived at the fort, a captain and four lieutenants. "Hello, my friend!" sang out the captain as they came up. "I see you are after the same game we are." "Yes, sir," I returned. "I saw those buffaloes coming. We are out of fresh meat, so I thought I would get some." The captain eyed my cheap-looking outfit closely.
Rather dingy villages, these each, after their kind, with a stone wharf thick-grown with weeds; a flouring mill at the head of the landing; a few cheap-looking, battlemented stores; boys and men lounging about with that air of comfortable idling which impresses one as the main characteristic of rustic hamlets, where nobody seems ever to have anything to do; a ferry running to the opposite shore for cattle and wagons, a heavy flat, with railings, made to drift with the current; and for foot passengers, a lumbering skiff, with oars chucking noisily in their roomy locks.
"Here's some of our kind," spoke Dan, at last, as he espied more than a dozen young men, in citizen's dress, strolling along under the trees. "I guess they're candidates, fast enough," nodded Darrin, after briefly looking at the approaching group. "Cheap-looking lot, most of them, aren't they?" asked Dalzell cheerfully. "Probably they're saying the same thing about us," chuckled Dave dryly.
Up and down the street, the same transformation had taken place: every big, comfortable old brick house now had two or three smaller frame neighbours crowding up to it on each side, cheap-looking neighbours, most of them needing paint and not clean and yet, though they were cheap looking, they had cost as much to build as the big brick houses, whose former ample yards they occupied.
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