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Poor Winthrop, marching with the city élégants, seems almost to have been astonished to find how wonderfully human were the hard-handed men of the Eighth Massachusetts. It takes all the nonsense out of everybody, or ought to do it, to see how fairly the real manhood of a country is distributed over its surface.

He was exactly of that school of elegants who fancy drinking a glass of wine with another, and introducing, are touches of breeding; it being altogether beyond his comprehension that both have especial uses, and are only to be resorted to on especial occasions.

And his long, pale, rather elegant face flickered as he made his sarcastic remarks. There they were, the two of them: two elegants in one sense: in the other sense, two units, absolutely adhering to the people, teeming with the distorted colliers. The same secret seemed to be working in the souls of all alike, Gudrun, Palmer, the rakish young bloods, the gaunt, middle-aged men.

Slim girls, exotic as the orchids they wore, gazing limpid-eyed at these warrior élégants. Women uniformed to the last degree of tailored exquisiteness. Girls, war accoutred, who brought arms up in sharp salute as they passed Emma.

Among these indispensables, were Jack Fairmay, Willie Airey and a great many more of our "Sparks Street" elegants. How much better they look on a freezing afternoon with their noses blue and their fur caps pulled comfortably down over their ears, than in the painfully proper looking long-tailed broad cloth and white kids, exactions of society's absolute laws.

They were corporals, and had won promotion so early after joining the French army, not because of any social position they may have had in those days, now so long past, when these two young elegants thought of little that was serious; no, they had won promotion for bravery in the face of the enemy, because of the example they had set, because, indeed, they were good soldiers.

Stock-riders and bull-punchers rubbed shoulders with elegants in skirted coats and shepherd's plaid trousers, who adroitly skipped heaps of stones and mortar, or crept along the narrow edging of kerb. The visitors from up-country paused to listen to a brass band that played outside a horse-auction mart; to watch the shooting in a rifle-gallery.