Is this to be a wholesale attack, then, on our national courage? Had we no brave men, then, that only these apologies for men are exhibited? Yes!--thousand upon thousand of brave men, and hundred upon hundred of brave officers--the world over no better or truer! But they were, as they _are_, the men of action, not of _show_, or at least not of show _alone_. One incident of the morning of the Second of July, when the Seven Days Battles were yet in progress before Richmond, will at once supply a few figures for this background, and an illustration of the public feeling for the soldiers of the little army of action and the great army of sham! A few words had been permitted by the telegraph-censors to come through, and they had arrived too late for the morning papers. They were consequently bulletined. They gave some hint of the abandonment of the White House and the severe fighting which followed that movement, on Saturday and Sunday. They were not hopeful--they were discouraging--much worse, as it afterwards appeared, than the truth demanded; and the knit brows and set teeth of the readers did not show any symptoms of improvement under the new revelation. A considerable group of men were standing about the "World" bulletin, stopping, reading and passing on--all the more slowly because the shade of the high building was refreshing in that hot, blinding, cloudless July morning sun. A group of politicians who had read the bulletins and taken their second breakfast at Crook and Duff's, were digesting the one and picking their teeth from the fragments of the other, before the door of that unaccountably-popular establishment, on the block above. Over the street from the "World" corner, at the Park fence, a dozen or two of invalid soldiers, with jaundiced faces and shabby uniforms, who had arrived by steamer from the South the day before and taken up their temporary abode in the dirty Barracks,--were standing lounging and listening to what was read from the bulletin; while a sentinel paraded up and down the walk, outside, to prevent escapes that did not seem over-probable. Voices were a little high, though not in disagreement, among the group at the corner--for they were discussing the very subject noted--that of _absenteeism and military sham_.