"Not better, perhaps, but more steadily--not so dashingly, but more inevitably," said Leslie, going into one of his fits of abstract philosophy, where he must perforce be followed, like a maniac by his keeper. "Our New York boys go into the fight more as a spree--the New Englanders more as a duty. Our boys enjoy it--they endure it; and some one else than myself must decide which is the higher order of courage. Almost all the New Englanders are comparatively fanatics, while we have very few indeed, unless it may be fanaticism to worship the old flag--God bless it! If it could have been possible for England to be plunged into a general war with some other country, immediately after the Restoration, something like this same distinction would have been seen. Sir Gervase Langford would have charged upon the foe, his feathers flying and his lady's colors woven into a love-knot above his cuirass, singing a roundelay of decidedly loose tendencies, precisely as he had once charged beside Prince Rupert on the bloody day of Long Marston; and Master John Grimston would have snuffled a psalm through his nose and made a thanksgiving prayer over a cut throat, swinging his long two-handed sword meanwhile, as he had done when mowing down the 'malignants' at Naseby, under the very eye of Oliver himself. That would have been an odd mixture for the same army; but we have an odder, when the neat-whiskered clerk from behind the dry-goods counter in this city--the rough fisherman from Cape Cod--the lumberman from the forests of Maine--and the long, gangling squirrel-hunters from the wilds of Wisconsin,--all meet together to fight for the same cause." "True," said Harding--"true. And I suppose that fanaticism _does_ fight well. It has no fear of death, and very little of consequences. How much difference was there, I wonder, between Ali at the head of his Moslem horde, fresh from the teachings of Mohammed himself, and fully impressed with the belief that if he died he should go at once to the company of the Houris in Paradise,--and Cromwell--or Old John Brown--in a corresponding madness of supposed Christianity? Not much, eh?"