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Think of it, lady of the agricultural and ornithological bonnet and the irreproachable silks, when the next time in a city railroad car two "soldiers" sit down beside you, and one is a spruce, natty-whiskered, good-looking member of a pet regiment of the N.G.S.N.Y. or the N.Y.S.M., going down to an evening drill and a supper of oysters after it, and the other a hard-featured and weather-beaten discharged soldier from our Southern battle-fields, lame or otherwise, in faded uniform and a shirt not too suggestive of plentiful washerwomen, think of this, and if you smile bewitchingly upon the one, as is your nature, when he apologizes for accidentally creasing your dress, do not father up your robes with too much contempt, from contact with the stained garments of the other, who has outraged your amor propre by taking a place beside you; for though you may be merely shunning contact with a vulgar ruffian or a coward who has deserted his colors in the hour of need you may be insulting a hero.
And yet through every corridor of the leading houses at Niagara, in every parlor, on every walk and on every piazza, sat, stood, walked, read, smoked or flirted, the blue-clothed, buttoned, shoulder-strapped, jaunty-capped, natty-whiskered and killingly-moustached officers of the Union army, who had sworn to serve the country and aid to defend the republic, but who paid no more attention to the pleading call of the generals in the field or the authoritative voice of the President, than they would have done to a blind piper playing in the street!
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