Here some swift return of thought to its everyday channel causes thee suddenly to wheel in thy revolving chair and face inward. Thou remarkest the vacant lounges and sofas, thou absorbest the drear silence. Is it the tabernacle on a week-day? Evidently, thou bethinkest thee of the many absentees. Anon, with thy ample white handkerchief mopping the beads from thy brow, thou exclaimest, ‘Shame upon them! Why, even the thermometer, though a creature metallic, is more sensitive than these renegades to the momentous occasion. Sure, the mercury rises to it! But they--they run from it. Now degenerate, not only from their sires, but their own boyhood. Ah, my good sir,’ giving another impulsive turn to the revolving chair so as directly to face the one person present, a somewhat reserved gentleman of mature years engaged in methodically refolding a letter just perused, ‘Ah, my good sir, it is your boy who is your true patriot. _He_ made on the _Third_ for Long Branch or elsewhere? Nay, sir, on the Third, if not before, he lays in his ammunition, his powder-crackers; at early dawn on the blessed Fourth he crams his breeches-pockets with them, and though in his heedless enthusiasm, mixing them up there with his matches, they get ignited and suddenly begin going off like minute-guns hurried up, making him a spluttering blunderbuss to himself and the crowd, what recks he if but luckily he come out of it unharmed? Another boy, a yet more devoted young acolyte of the Salii, should repeated discharges at last burst his toy-cannon, and he go to Hades for it, what then? _Ducit amor patriae!_ That’s the inscription, sir, on General Worth’s monument you and I pass every day. Ten to one you never noticed it--the inscription, I mean. Ah, but he was a paladin, a homespun paladin, General Worth. And happy in his surname, though indeed his _worth_ was of another sort than that of the purse.’