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Updated: May 24, 2025
"Aber what a heat, what a heat!" The brass-buttoned hotel porter, a-sprawl in a wicker chair in the hall, lowered his newspaper and looked up over his silver spectacles. He was comfortably unbuttoned here and there, and had omitted to shave that morning, for this was July, 1916, and since the war had turned Switzerland's tourists into Europe's cannon-fodder, he had run somewhat to seed.
And, crouched in the stern-sheets of this boat was a moaning, praying woman, who cried and screamed at intervals, for husband and baby, and would not be comforted, even when one of the brass-buttoned officers assured her that her child was safe in the care of John Rowland, a brave and trusty sailor, who was certainly in the other boat with it.
In his swallow-tailed, brass-buttoned, old-fashioned coatee, Burns seemed a very comic sight to the nearest boys in blue until they found he really meant to join them and that he knew a thing or two of war. "Which way are the rebels?" he asked, "and where are our troops? I know how to fight I've fit before." So he did; and he fought to good purpose till wounded three times.
George continued dressing; selecting his best and most becoming scarf; pinning down the lapels of his buff waistcoat; scissoring the points of his high collar, and with Todd's assistance working his arms between the slits in the silk lining of the sleeves of his blue cloth, brass-buttoned coat, which he finally pulled into place across his chest.
In five minutes you meet Spanish officers; nuns in broad-leaved white bonnets; a bearded sergeant nursing a baby; bare-legged, sun-burnished Moors; pink-and-white cheeked ladies'-maids from Kent; local mashers in such outrageously garish tweeds; stiff brass-buttoned turnkeys; Jews in skull-cap and Moslems in fez; and while you are lost in admiration of a burly negro, turbaned and in grass-green robe, with face black and shiny as a newly-polished stove, you are hustled by a sailor on cordial terms with himself who is vigorously attempting to whistle "Garry Owen."
"We had not uttered a disrespectful word," said the first, "but were joking together, when that brass-buttoned idiot pounced upon us. We simply defended ourselves, as every man has a right to do, and we don't propose to let the matter rest here."
She showed plainly that she regarded this brass-buttoned official as one unbearably insolent in his demeanor toward her. Nevertheless, she condescended to reply, with an exaggeration of the aristocratic drawl to indicate her displeasure. "I was introduced to Miss Turner," she explained, "by Mr. Richard Gilder. Perhaps you have heard of his father, the owner of the Emporium."
Every afternoon Virginia drove with her father and her aunt to Camp Jackson. All the fashion and beauty of the city were there. The bands played, the black coachmen flecked the backs of their shining horses, and walking in the avenues or seated under the trees were natty young gentlemen in white trousers and brass-buttoned jackets. All was not soldier fare at the regimental messes.
She looked with interest at his scanty possessions, his sword, the line of riding-boots against the wall, the belts and spurs hung on nails, the brass-buttoned greatcoat hanging behind the door. In his sitting-room she read the names of the books on a roughly-made stand to try to judge of his taste in literature.
What bearing have its theory and practice upon the conduct of life? A brass-buttoned guardian of the peace remarked to a gentleman on a street-corner, "If we could open more kindergartens, sir, we could almost shut up the penitentiaries, sir!"
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