“Say, look here; you're an old man, and that's enough to save you!” Speedman suddenly was sobbing in his mortification. “But--but you've got no right to say things like that to me. You've--you've-” A gulp cut the miserable youngster's utterance short. He choked and plaintively tried again: “If we can't win we can't win--and that's all there is to it! Isn't it, fellows?” He looked to his companions in distress for comfort; but all of them, as though mesmerised, were looking at Major Stone. It dawned on me, watching and listening across the threshold, that some influence--some electric appeal to an inner consciousness of theirs--was beginning to galvanise them, taking the droop out of their spines, and making their frames tense where there had been a sag of nonresistance, and putting sparks of resentment into their eyes. The transformation had been almost instantaneously accomplished, but it was plainly visible. “I am not expecting that you should win,” snapped the Major, turning Speedman's words into an admonition for all of them. “I do not believe it is humanly possible for you to win. There is nothing disgraceful in being fairly defeated; the disgrace is in accepting defeat without fighting back with all your strength and all your will and all your skill and all your strategy and all your tactics. And that is exactly what I have just seen you doing. And that, judging by all the indications, is exactly what you will go on doing during the remaining portion of this affair.” There were no more interruptions. For perhaps two or three minutes more, then, the old Major went steadily on, saying his say to the end. Saying it, he wasn't the Old Major I had known before; he was not pottering and ponderous; he did not clothe his thoughts in cumbersome, heavy phrases. He fairly bit the words off--short, bitter, scorching words--and spat them out in their faces. He did not plead with them; nor--except by indirection--did he invoke a sentiment that was bound to be as much a part of them as the nails on their fingers or the teeth in their mouths. And, somehow, I felt--and I knew they felt--that here, in this short, stumpy white-haired form, stood the Old South, embodied and typified, with all its sectional pride and all its sectional devotion--yes, and all its sectional prejudices. All at once, in the midst of a sentence, he checked up; and then, staring hard at them through a pause, he spoke his final message: “You are of the seed of heroes. Try to remember that when you go back out yonder before that great crowd. You are the sons of men who had sand, who had bottom, who had all the things a fighting man should have. Try--if you can--to remember it!” Out from behind the group that had clustered before the speaker, darted a diminutive darky--Midsylvania's self-appointed water carrier: