‘Ah, Major,’ I said, ‘I love thee; yes, and it is as much for thy queer little human foibles as thy not-so-common virtues. Come now, for all thy annual megrims, prouder art thou of that empty sleeve of thine than even of thy grandfather’s Revolutionary insignia, for _this_ thou didst but inherit, the other, conferred on thee at first hand, and by the God of Battles.’ Not often dost thou discuss the tactics of thy Virginia campaigns, but what things hast thou told us of its byplay--the scouting, the foraging, the riding up to lovely mansions garrisoned by a faithful old slave or two, servants to lovely damsels more terrible than Mars in their feminine indignation at the insolent invader; in other instances being coquettishly served at an improvised lunch on some broad old piazza by less implacable beauties reduced by the calamities to dispensing hospitality for the enemy’s greenbacks. In such and similar passages of the war thou aboundest, passages luckily not susceptible of being formalised into professed history. But the better for the felicity of thy friends, thou hast more than one string to thy harp, Major. Did any listener ever tire of thy reminiscences of European travel? What signifies that they date so far back, before some of us were born? Even so do sundry inestimable vintages in the Club’s cellar. Pleasant it is when weary of the never-ending daily news, the same sort of thing forever, how pleasant to be spirited back by a tale, by some veteran’s living voice and eloquent gestures, to a period that is no news at all, a time prior to those more pronounced changes which have come over so few portions of that ancient and manifold world across the Atlantic, a world to which we are bound by unsunderable ties of genealogy. Highly, Major, didst thou relish that title whereby, as regards so many of us Americans, a rare son of New England with happiest simplicity designated that Elder England, from which his progenitor came--_Our Old Name_. But if thy filial appreciation of the historic Past has something of Nathaniel Hawthorne in it, the medium, Dean, through which thou recallest it, viewing it as through an irradiated vapour, this is not without a touch of _our incomparable friend_, the Marquis. He, as well thou knowest, never is so happy, never so blissfully serene, as when wandering in a haze along that enchanted beach.