Scarcely had he spoken, my boy, when there emerged from the edge of the wood before us a rebel company, headed by an officer of hairy countenance and much shirt collar. This officer's face was a whisker plantation, through which his eyes peeped forth like two snakes coiled up in a window-brush. His dress was shoddy, his air was toddy, and a yard of valuable stair-carpet enveloped his manly shoulders. "Halt!" said he to his file of reptiles, whose general effect was that of a congress of rag-merchants just come in from a happy speculation in George-Law muskets. "Sir," said the officer, bowing in a graceful semicircle, "I am somewhat in the First Family way, own a plantation, drink but little water at home, and have the honor to be Captain Munchausen, of the Southern Confederacy." "Dost fence?" says Villiam, grimly drawing his sword. "Fence!" says Captain Munchausen, also drawing his disguised crowbar. "Didst ever hear, boy, or read, of that great fencer of the olden time, the Chevalier St. George?" "Often," says Villiam, in a tone that was as plainly the echo of a lie as is that of the delicate female eater of slate-pencils, when she says that she never could bear pork and beans. "Well," says Captain Munchausen, haughtily, "the chevalier was so extremely jealous of my superior skill, that he actually went and died nearly a hundred years before I was born." "Soap," says Villiam, like one talking in his sleep, "is sometimes made with powerful lie." "By Chivalry!" says Captain Munchausen, cholerically; "I swear, I never told a single lie in all my life." "A _single_ lie!" says Villiam, abstractedly; "ah, no! for the lies of the Southern Confederacy are all married, and have large families." This domestic speech, my boy, was too much for Munchausen. Asking one of the rag merchants to hold his three-ply overcoat, and carefully removing his fragmentary cap, that none of the cold potatoes should spill out of it, he planted the remains of his right boot slightly in advance of the skeleton of his left, and thundered: "'Sblood!" Quick as the lightning leaps along the cloud did Captain Villiam Brown send the great toe of his dexter foot to meet that of his foe; his Damascus blade lay across the opposing brand, and he whispered: "'Sdeath!" It was a beautiful sight--by Minerva it was! "Stop!" says Villiam, suddenly hauling in his weapon again; "it shall never be said that I took advantage of a foeman." As he uttered these memorable words, my boy, this ornament of the service plucked an infant demijohn from his fearless bosom and magnanimously passed it to his antagonist. A soft commotion was visible in the whiskers of Captain Munchausen--the suburb of a smile as it were; a cavern opened in their midst, the vessel ascended curvilinearly thereto, and the sound was as the trickling of water down a mountain gulch.