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A party of soldiers are making good cheer in a corner of the pasture, perhaps I ought to say parade-ground. As no sentinel accosts us, we hunt up one, and inquire if the fort is accessible. He does not know, but inclines to the opinion that it is. We go up the hill, walk round the wall, and mark well her bulwarks, till we come to a great gate, but it refuses to turn.
The affected young dandy was extremely unpopular with every one. Besides which, he was clearly not blessed with much intelligence; for at garrison-drill more reproofs and reprimands were showered upon him alone than upon all the rest of the battery put together. Again and again would Wegstetten's trumpet-tones ring across the parade-ground: "Lieutenant Landsberg, you are not in your right place!"
Beyond the parade-ground, which extended south of the pickets, were the company gardens, well filled with currant-bushes and young fruit-trees. The fort stood at what might naturally be supposed to be the mouth of the river.
I went for a purposeless walk from one end of the place to the other, and found a crowd of native boys playing football on what might have been a parade-ground of old days. 'And what school is that? I asked in English of a small, eager youth. 'Madrissah, said he most intelligently, which being translated means just 'school. 'Yes, but what school?
The tall figure, clad in the blue uniform of the United States army, always scrupulously neat, striding to and from the Institute, or standing in the centre of the parade-ground, while the cadet battalion wheeled and deployed at his command, was familiar to the whole community. But Jackson's heart was not worn on his sleeve.
After the usual religious ceremony, they filed out from the city parade-ground. Being unavoidably detained for a few moments, we did not come up until some time after the column had started.
He cursed his weakness in allowing himself to dawdle about those arsenals and that parade-ground, and to be so far misguided by a hardened bachelor as to admire certain yellow-haired German and black-haired Hungarian women on the promenade; when he came to think of going out in that sledge, it was with anathema maranatha.
He had at last, in sheer boredom, joined a party of bridge-players, with the result that he had not seen much of his young wife throughout the evening. Returning from the parade-ground, he wondered if he would find her up, and then caught sight of her waving away the marauders in scanty attire on the veranda. He called a greeting to her, and she instantly vanished into her room.
'Come out to the parade-ground, before the dining-house, and I will tell you all. I left a half-score of general officers and brigadiers drinking round the General's table, and found Mrs. Washington waiting for me. She then told me it was the speech I had made about the box of Marquises, with which the General was offended.
"The only mistake that has been made in this business was when Colonel Gansevoort condescended to give out any statement while the men were ripe for mutiny," Sergeant Corney stopped to say to me, as I met him on the parade-ground while going to the barracks to summon some of the lads whose time for sentinel-duty had come.
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