Escorted by the Lieutenant, the two citizens took their way to the "big house"--a hotel standing on the north side of the railroad track and very near it--a wooden building of two stories, with a piazza in front and at the east end, and flanked by a row of horse-sheds indicating that there was some dependence made upon the patronage of fast drivers stopping there on race days or when trotting was peculiarly good on the pike or the plank. Before the house paced two sentries, with muskets at the shoulder, though what they were guarding was not so clear, as every one passed who wished to do so, whether in uniform or citizen's dress. Behind the corner of the piazza, eastward, an officer was leaning back in his chair against the clap-boards, with his hat over his eyes and apparently asleep; and a few feet from him a sergeant, distinguishable by three dingy stripes on his arm that should have been laid upon his back, was toying, not too decently, with a woman whose looks and manners both proclaimed her one of the "necessary evils" of a modern community. "Do they allow such actions as that--right here in public, and in the very presence of the officers?" asked Smith, whose education had possibly been a little neglected in some other particulars, as Brown's had been in the details of the military profession. "Guess so!" was the significant reply of Woodruff. "Come up stairs!" and the party passed on. As they did so, they looked through a door to the left, and saw a bar of unplaned boards extending the whole length of a spacious room, with half a dozen attendants behind it and as many beer kegs and whiskey decanters pouring out their contents. Mingled with here and there a civilian, the whole front of the bar was full of soldiers, all apparently drinking, and drinking again, and drinking yet again, nibbling cheese, crackers and smoked-beef meanwhile, apparently to keep up the necessary thirst. "Fire and fall back!" seemed to be a military axiom not always observed by the rank and file of the Two Hundredth, as many of them kept their places and went on with their guzzling, with a determination worthy of a much better cause. But it was occasionally observed, after all, for there were a few who had been overcome by the heat of the bibulatory conflict, and who had relapsed into partial helplessness in chairs around the walls; and there were others who began to stagger and talk thickly at the counter, growing obscure and maudlin in their oaths, and shaking hands altogether too often, indicating the sleepy stage as very soon to follow.