On this day, and being weary with the sight of Peg's empty chair, I went down the hall to the General's workroom and found him with his nose in _Tristram Shandy_.' “Do you like your author?” said I. “Why, sir,” said the General, laying aside the book, “he is so grown up to sedge of phrase and choked of word-weeds as to deny one either the sight or the taste of the true stream of his story.” “Walpole,” I returned, “said that reading _Tristram_ was to laugh a moment and yawn an hour.” “Then he had the better of me, since I have done nothing but yawn.” After a pause: “Peg gave me the book; it was my loyalty to the child that sent me between its pages. And speaking of Peg: Do you still send her the roses? I know you do, for I met your Jim on his way to her, buried in blossoms and looking for all the world like the flower booth in a village fair.” Here the General lazily reached for his pipe. “And why should she not have the flowers?” I demanded, warmly. “No reason under the sky, sir,” said he, giving me that old glance out of the falcon eyes of him--to anger me, I suppose--“none under the sky! Send our pretty Peg the roof off the house should she have a mind for it.” Then, when now his pipe was going: “Was it not you to recommend a round, squat, corpulent being named Curtis to be marshal for Tennessee?” “I said he was a good man.” “One might say as much of a pan of dough. The creature is absolutely without motion; I tried him mentally and physically, so to speak; the man is stagnant.” “None the less a good man,” I contended. “To do nothing is at least to do no harm.” “Now, that is as may be,” retorted the General. “I will have nothing to do with your motionless folk. They are always the worst folk of all. I never have been in any crush of peril or concern where action was not less hazardous than inaction, and to do the wrong thing far and away better than to do nothing at all. Now, this fellow Curtis of yours would not even talk. He had no more conversation than a catfish.” “Silence is caution,” said I, dogmatically, also reaching down a pipe from the mantel to keep the General in smoky countenance; “silence is caution, and caution is ever a good thing.” “Caution is a braggart,” returned the General, argumentatively, “to call itself a virtue when it is more often a cover for cowardice. Caution has lost more fights than rashness, you may take a soldier's word for that.” “That is in keeping with your other proverb, 'Never overrate a foe.' Those be the maxims to get folk killed!” “And why not, so the folk be the enemy? I have beaten twice my strength because they overrated me.” “Still,” said I, stubbornly, “the crime of silence which you charge upon this Curtis is no mighty delinquency. Words, as a rule, are a weakness; and I think Curtis should be marshal.”