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She went on, hour after hour, till I was sorry I ever opened the mosquito question and gave her a start. Folks'll tell you't I've always ben kind o' offish and partic'lar for a gal that's raised in the woods, and I am, with the rag-tag and bob-tail, and a gal has to be, if she wants to be anything, but when people comes along which is my equals, I reckon I'm a pretty sociable heifer after all."
At the sight and scent of the warm blood, the companions of the stricken brute the gaunt, tireless leaders, who had traveled beside him in the van, and the rag-tag and bobtail alike fell upon him tooth and nail, and the silence of the forest was shattered by the blood-cry of the meat-getters.
That Jefferson was able in the face of this victorious and discouraging army to form a great party out of the rag-tag and bobtail element, animating his policy of decentralization into a virile and indelible Americanism, proved him to be a man of genius. History shows us few men so contemptible in character, so low in tone; and no man has given his biographers so difficult a task.
By now the Law and Order forces had become numerically formidable. The bobtail and rag-tag, ejected either by force or by fright, flocked to the colours. A certain proportion of the militia remained in the ranks, though a majority had resigned.
They are at one point of general information; namely, they all know what you have just told them, and will none of them know it by next time. I call it the rag-tag and bob-tail class. John says they are like forced tulips. They won't blossom simultaneously. He can't get them all to one standard of reading." Mr. Lindsay laughed and said,
"How can you be lame in your legs when there's no bone in them? How can your arm be out of joint when there's no joint? Get up!" Rag-Tag rolled out of the corner and tumbled across the floor, heels over head. "Now, then," said the little old woman, opening her satchel, "what can I do for you?" "She's pulled all my hair out!" whispered the China Doll.
Then began a strange defile of rag-tag humanity to the Cadogan Square door women, men, of all nationalities and pretensions. But the evil was beyond their power. At last an American specialist, who had won renown by turning a famous woman of sixty into the semblance of a woman of six-and-thirty for a short time was called in. Lady Holme knew that his verdict must be final.
Why, it used to be the court end of the town years ago." "So was North Bennet Street, and all the rest of the North End; and now it's turned over to the rag-tag of creation, Russian Jews, and every other kind of a foreigner, and look here!" suddenly interrupting herself, as a new idea struck her, "I'll bet you anything that this Esther Bodn is a foreigner, an emigrant herself of some sort."
"What's the score, captain?" he asked the panting captain. "Tenth North Ullr and the Fifth Cavalry have mutinied; so have these rag-tag Auxiliaries. That mob down there's part of them." He was puffing under the double effort of running and talking. "Whole thing blew up in seconds; no chance to communicate with anybody...."
In this last phrase, "All the rag-tag that can be picked up," we have the key to the situation; for though orders to press "no aged, diseased or infirm persons, nor boys," were sufficiently explicit, yet in order to swell the returns, and to appease in some degree the fleet's insatiable greed for men, the gangs raked in recruits with a lack of discrimination that for the better part of a century made that fleet the most gigantic collection of human freaks and derelicts under the sun.
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