All this was deemed very absurd at the time. The war, it was thought, could not last more than sixty days--an opinion which Mr. Secretary of State Seward, on the other side of the line, confidently shared, though his anticipations of the end of it were quite different from those entertained at the South. Why a young man of spirit, such as Arthur Brent was, should refuse to enter upon the brief but glorious struggle in the capacity of a major with the prospect of coming out of it a brigadier-general, his neighbors could not understand. Nor could any of them, with one exception, understand his anticipations of a long war, or his conviction that, end as it might, the war would make an early end of slavery, overturning the South’s industrial system and bringing sore poverty upon the people. The one exception was Robert Copeland, the thrifty young man who had lost caste by “making too many hogsheads of tobacco to the hand.” He shared Arthur’s views, and he acted upon them in ways that Arthur would have scorned to do. He sent all his negroes to Richmond to be sold by auction to the traders to the far South. He converted his plantation, with all its live stock and other appurtenances into money, and with the proceeds of these his sellings he hurried to New York and purchased diamonds. These he bestowed in a belt which he buckled about his person and wore throughout the war, upon the principle that whatever value there might or might not be in other things when the war should be over, diamonds always command their price throughout the civilized world. When after this was done he sought to enlist in one of the companies forming in his neighborhood, he was rejected by unanimous vote, because he had sold negroes, while the men of the company held rigidly to a social standard of conduct which he had flagrantly defied. He went to Richmond. He raised a company of ruffians, which included many “jailbirds” and the like. He made himself its captain, and went into the field as the leader of a “fighting battery.” He distinguished himself for daring, and came out of the war, four years later, a brigadier-general. As such he was excluded from the benefits of the early amnesty proclamation. But he cared little about that. He went to New York, sold his diamonds for fifty per cent more than their cost, and accepted high office in the army of the Khedive of Egypt. He thus continued active in that profession of arms in which he had found his best opportunity to exercise his peculiar gift of “getting out of men all there is in them”--which was the phrase chosen by himself to describe his own special capabilities.[C] XXXIII “AT PARIS IT WAS”