That the Sutler's gallantry in action was specially exemplified in a "charge," is a chestnut bald and hoary with unchallenged longevity. It is one of those remarks that vegetate through a sequence of drowsy centuries, to reappear during each spring season of chronology with a masterful reach that brushes cobwebs from the skies and topples chimneys down. Representative war-humorists who ride astride the whistling winds, spurting effluent sluices of word-wash, and typical war orators sorely afflicted with engorgement of vocabulary, combine to exploit this moldy scintillation, joint product of brain sweat and elbow unguent. They talk through their chapeaux. Every man is a quotation from his forefathers. Every pun is a quotation from paleocrystic cerebration. As vinegar to the teeth and smoke to the eyes, so is misprint witticism to the properly instructed intelligence. It is wicked to laugh at a bishop; it is criminal to laugh at jokeless jocularity. He who can separate eloquence from the gastric gases and distinguish between the sharps and flats of _facetiae_, suppressing his intellectual impatience at the unbridled linguistic solecism, may pertinently ask: Wherefore not? To charge was human, but to collect was sublime; always difficult, often impossible. The credit a Sutler was obliged to give was often as long as a plea in chancery. He was the old man not afraid of eternity; and the prospective extended term of payment, if happily payment should ever come at all, was a prime element in adjusting margins of profit. His sole competitor in this line of making a charge is said to be the modern plumber--he of the slow step and quick respiration redolent of raw onions--he of the small tenderness and large bill. But that is a chestnut musty as the other. Boycott both of them! Only a man of most stomachful and gunpowder instincts, a warrior and a blood-quaffer from aforetime, could long survive the rueful infliction of either.