“Where is this heroic bugler of the Spanish war?” said Uncle Ike, trying to be calm, but actually frothing at the mouth. “Bring him here, and let me hear him say these things, condemn him, and I will take him across my knee and I will knock the wind out of him, so that he can never gather enough in his carcass to blow another bugle. Why, confound him, he is a liar. The war of the rebellion was a war, not a country schuetzenfest, with a chance to go home every night and sleep in a feather bed, and get a Turkish bath. The whole Spanish war, except what the navy did, was not equal to an outpost skirmish in '63. Of course, the rough riders and the weary walkers did a nice job going up San Juan hill, but we had a thousand such fights in the rebellion. After that skirmish there was nothing done by the army at Santiago, but to sit down in the mud and wait for the Spaniards to eat their last cracker, and kill their last dog and eat it, and then surrender. Ask that bugler to tell you where he found, in his glorious career as a wind instrument in the Spanish war, any Grants, Shermans, Sheridans, Logans, Pap Thomases, McClellans, Kilpatricks, Custers, McPhersons, Braggs, and hundreds of such heroes. What has the bugler got to show for his war? Shafter! And Alger! And all of them quarreling over the little bone of victory that was not big enough for a meal for our old generals of the war of the rebellion. And he talks about our pensions, the young kid. He probably wears corsets. Why, we didn't get pensions until we got so old we couldn't get up alone. His gang of Jacksonville heroes will probably get pensions when they are old enough. Bring that bugler in here some day, and don't let him know what he is going to run up against, and I will give you a dollar, and I will let you see me dust the carpet with him,” and the old man sat down and fanned himself, while the boy looked scared for fear Uncle Ike was going to have a fit. “Why, at the battle of Pea Ridge, when a minie ball struck me, when I was on the firing line----” “Keno,” said the red-headed boy, as he went through the window head first, and over the picket fence on his stomach, and disappeared down the street. CHAPTER VIII. “Say, Uncle Ike, don't you think the Fourth of July is sort of played out?” asked the red-headed boy, as he came to Uncle Ike's room on the morning of the 5th, by appointment, to demonstrate to the old man that he had not been quite killed by the celebration of the great day. “It seems to me we don't have half as many accidents and fires as we used to,” and the boy counted off to the uncle the dozen injuries he had received by burns, and dug into his eye with a soiled handkerchief in search of some gravel from a torpedo.