This bantering trick, so common with him, breaking out as it often did at most unexpected and often atrociously inappropriate moments, was an index of the side of his character most open to the general eye. Joe was but eighteen years old when he enlisted, just the age when the boy is passing into the man; a good six feet in stature, without an ounce of spare flesh, long armed, loose-jointed, at once too undeveloped and too full of individuality to wear any conventional garb with ease, so that Uncle Sam's shop-made and ill-fitting uniform hung upon his youthful but powerful frame with anything but martial impressiveness. This, however, troubled him little. An undue care for appearance was never one of his foibles, and the pomp and circumstance of war always smote his keen Yankee sense of the ludicrous. Yet he had withal the manner and the heart of a gentleman, and if you looked into those merry yet piercing eyes, or listened for five minutes to the original ideas expressed by that well modulated and pleasant voice with just a suspicion of "away-down-East" accent in it, you would be compelled to feel that in this boy there was the making of no common man. For a long time Joe was a puzzle to his comrades. They could not understand why such a great boy, and one too, so unmilitary in his ways, should be a corporal. Some of the older men resented it. And then, his persistent practical joking, his careless independence and smiling indifference to rebuke or criticism was perplexing, not to say exasperating. Yet no one could positively dislike him. He might be provoking at times, yet every one knew him incapable of anything mean, and his untiring good-nature and open-handed generosity made warm friends for him from the very start. The captain certainly showed himself a good judge of men when he made Joe a corporal, though it took time to justify the choice, and the honours of office sat but lightly upon the recipient. Not until our days of battle came did Joe show any care for military distinction, and he never bothered himself about the promotion which others sought so eagerly.