The chief musician "sounded on the bugle horn." The Glee Club of Company C filed on the stage with three banjos and two guitars, bowed elegantly, and sang the "Bonny Blue Flag." The applause was thunderous. A large bearded man in the front row lifted a voice that boomed like one of Ashby's cannon. "Encore! Encore!" Company C sang "Listen to the Mocking Bird." The audience gently sighed, took the pipe from its lips, and joined in-- "Listen to the mocking bird--Listen to the mocking bird.... The mocking bird still singing o'er her grave. Listen to the mocking bird--Listen to the mocking bird.... Still singing where the weeping willows wave." The pine trees took it up, and the hazel copses and the hurrying Shenandoah. "Twas in the mild September--September--September, And the mocking bird was singing far and wide." "_Far and wide_.... That's grand, but it sure is gloomy. Next!" The chief musician, having a carrying voice, made announcements. "No. 2. Debate. Which will first recognize the Confederacy, England or France? With the historic reasons for both doing so. England, Sergeant Smith. France, Sergeant Duval.--The audience is not expected to participate in the debate otherwise than judicially, at the close." The close saw it decided by a rising vote that England would come first--Sergeant Smith, indeed, who chanced to be a professor of belles-lettres at a great school, having declared, with the gesture of Saint John on Patmos, that he saw approaching our shores a white winged ship bearing her declaration of amity. "No. 3," intoned the first musician. "Recitation by Private Edwin Horsemanden." Private Edwin Horsemanden gave the title of his selection, a poetic selection. Some of his fellow privates looked puzzled. "'Oz Etaliahn?'--What does 'Oz Etaliahn' mean? Cherokee or Choctaw, which? Explain it to us, Eddy. Is it something to eat--or to drink? ''T is true, 'tis pity, 'tis pity 'tis 'tis true'--but most of us never went to college!... Oh, an opera house!--In Paris, do you say? Go on, Eddy, go on!" "At Paris it was, at the opera there,-- And she looked like a queen in a book that night--" "Never saw one out of a book, did you?... Yes, I saw a gypsy queen once.... And the queen of the circus.... There's a man in Company D once saw the queen of England, saw her just as plain! She was wearing a scoop bonnet with pink roses around her face.... Sh! Shh!" "Of all the operas that Verdi wrote." "Who's Verdi?" "The best, to my taste, is the 'Trovatore.'" "'Trovatore?' Eddy, isn't that the serenading fellow who goes on singing till they hang him? Oh, Lord, yes! And the anvil chorus! The anvil chorus comes in there. Go on, Eddy. We feel perfectly at home." "And Mario" "Hm! stumped again." "can sooth with a tenor note The souls in Purgatory."