"Nonsense! Beg your pardon. Did you never read of Austerlitz and Jena and Waterloo? Our men did pretty well for militia. I didn't see the panic, to be sure;--I was picked up before that happened. But I have talked with some of our officers who did see it, and they told me that the papers exaggerated it absurdly. Newspaper correspondents ought not to be allowed in the army. They exaggerate every thing. If we had gained a victory, they would have made it out something greater than Waterloo. You must consider how easily inexperience is deceived. Just get the story of an upset from an old stage-driver, and then from a lady passenger; the first will tell it as quite an ordinary affair, and the second will make it out a tragedy. Now when some old grannies of congressmen and some young ladies of newspaper reporters, none of whom had ever seen either a victory or a defeat before, got entangled among half a dozen disordered regiments they naturally concluded that nothing like it had happened in history. I tell you that it wasn't unparalleled, and that it ought not to have been considered surprising. Whichever of those two green armies got repulsed was pretty sure to be routed. That was a very pretty manoeuvre, though, that coming up of Johnston on our right. Patterson ought to be court-martialed for his stupidity." "Stupidity! He is a traitor," exclaimed Colburne. "Oh! oh!" expostulated the Colonel with a cough. "If we are to try all our dull old gentlemen as traitors, we shall have our hands full. That's something like hanging homely old women for witches.--By the way, how are the Allstons? I mean the--the Ravenels. Well, are they? Young lady as blooming and blushing as ever? Glad to hear it. Can't stop to call on them; my train goes in ten minutes.--I am delighted that you are going to fall in with me. Good bye for to-day." Away he went, leaving Colburne in wonder over his contrasts of slanginess and gentility, his mingled audacity and _insouciance_ of character, and all the picturesque ins and outs of his moral architecture, so different from the severe plainness of the spiritual temples common in New Boston. The young man would have preferred that his future Colonel should not drink and swear; but he would not puritanically decide that a man who drank and swore could not be a good officer. He did not know army men well enough to dare judge them with positiveness; and he certainly would not try them by the moral standards according to which he tried civilians. The facts that Carter was a professional soldier, and that he had shed his blood in the cause of the country, were sufficient to make Colburne regard with charity all his frank vices.