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"Sure I've bin a gineral all day, an' fought as well as the best of ye, and now I'm to be turned back into a cook an' an old woman, when I'd be watching as sharply as any of the men lest those spalpeens of black-a-moors should be coming back at night to attack us," she exclaimed, as she sheathed her sword and doffed the captain's coat and hat.
And now the widow's mind went swiftly back to the General. "Sure, and it's a wonderful man he is," she cried. "Your father was jist such a man, barrin' he was Irish and no Gineral at all. 'Twas him that was at the bottom of your gettin' the place to Mr. Farnham's, a-trustin' you to do all the buyin' so's folks could see what was in you.
And the old Gineral he'd come to think she might do better; and he kep' a introducin' one and another, and tryin' to marry her off; but Ruth she wouldn't. She used to write sheets and sheets to your Aunt Lois about it; and I think Aunt Lois she kep' her grit up. Your Aunt Lois she'd a stuck by a man to the end o' time eft ben her case; and so she told Ruth.
"Certainly," assented the professor. "Nothing so injurious to weak eyes as too much light." "Y' 'ave put it in a nutshell," replied the priest. "Sure an' that's the rason we're opposed to gineral schoolin', an' to readin' the Bible to the children. Y' are a masther mind, Heller, an' ought to been in howly ordhers. An' that brings me to another idee av high importince.
"The Gineral was takin' a ride with a southerner one day over his farm to Bangor in Maine, to see his crops, fixin mill privileges and what not, and the southerner was a turning up his nose at every thing amost, proper scorney, and braggin' how things growed on his estate down south.
Lordy massy! nobody rightly knew where he hed ben or where he hadn't: all was, he turned up at last all alive, and chipper as a skunk blackbird. Wal, of course he made his court to Ruth; and the Gineral, he rather backed him up in it; but Ruth she wouldn't have nothin' to say to him.
His very nature seemed belligerent. "The trouble with you, Jim," she said, "is that you'd iver go foightin' in toimes of peace. Foight when foightin's to be done, and the rest of the toime look plissant loike the Gineral." "I ain't foightin' in times of peace any more," responded little Jim confidentially. "I ain't licked a boy for three weeks. Mebbe I won't lick any one all summer."
And thin whin I remimbered how thick the Gineral was with the Rebel gentry, and how fine ladies with the divil in their eyes bowed to him in Charlestown, and spit at and cocked up their noses at us soldiers, while their husbands were off, maybe, murthering my brother; and how the Gineral, proud as a paycock on his prancing chestnut sorrel, tould us in the meadow that Johnston was too strong for us to attack, but that if he would come out from behind his big guns the Gineral would lay his body on the sod before he'd lave it, whin he intended his body to lie on a soft bed the rest of his life, and how he said and did all this while our men, and my brother among them, were being murthered by this same Johnston that he was sent to hould back, I couldn't keep down my Irish bluid.
"Wal, if the gineral an' company was sthopped somewhere beyond thot pass?" queried Casey, shrewdly, as he took a deep pull at his pipe. "Then at least they could fight. They have stood off attacks before. They might hold out for the train following, or even run back." "Thin, Collins, we've only got to sthop the gineral's train before it reaches thot dom' trap." "But we can't!" cried Collins.
If you ladies could climb up one o' them big pines, you'd see the line of forts and trenches in a half-moon from the Chain Bridge at Georgetown to Alexandria, and you'd see the seminary in its pretty park, and, belike, Gineral McClellan in the chapel cupola, a-spying through his spy-glass what deviltry them rebel batteries is hatching on the hill over yonder." "Are the rebels there?" "Yes'm.
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