“Herman had been here about a year, off and on. He didn't seem to know nobody, and he didn't have any friends. He wasn't more'n nineteen years old--or maybe twenty; and he was shy and awkward and homely. He used to go out through the county with a pack on his back, sellin' gimcracks to country people. He could make change all right--I reckin he jest natchelly inherited that ez a gift--and he was smart enough at drivin' a bargain; but somehow it seemed like he jest couldn't learn to talk English, or to understand it, neither, exceptin' when the subject was business. Understand, that was thirty-odd years back; but sometimes, even now, when old Herman gits excited, you'd think, to hear him, that he didn't know much English yit. His language matches the shape of his laigs then.” I nodded understanding, Mr. Felsburg's conversational eccentricities being a constant fount of material for the town humourists of my own generation. The Judge went on: “Well, anyway, he signed up that night, along with all the rest of us. And after that, fur a few days, so many things was happenin' that I sort of forgot about him; and I reckin nearly everybody else did too. It seemed like the whole town sort of went crazy fur a spell, whut with the first company, which was our company, electin' its officers, and the County Battery formin', and a troop of cavalry organisin', and the older men enrollin' fur home defence, and a lot of big-moth fellers standin' round on street comers lowin as how it was goin' to be only a ninety-day picnic, anyway, and that any Southern man could whip five Yankees--and so forth and so on. “And then we'd go home at night and find our mothers and sisters settin' round a coal-oil lamp, makin' our new grey uniforms, and sewin' a tear in with every stitch. And every feller's sweetheart was makin' him a silk sash to wear round his waist. I could git a sash round my waist then, but I s'pose if I felt called on to wear one now I'd have to hire old man Dillon, the mattress maker, to make one fur me out of a roll of bedtickin.” And the speaker glanced downward toward the bulge of his girth. “My mother kept telling me that it would kill her for me to go--and that she'd kill me if I didn't go,” interpolated Doctor Lake. “I reckin no set of men on this earth ever went out to fight with the right sort of spirit in 'em onless their womenfolk stood behind 'em, biddin' 'em to go,” said the old Judge. “That's the way it was with us, anyway--I know that much. Well then, right on top of everything else, along come the big ball they gave us at the Richland House the night before we left fur Camp Boone to be mustered in, regular fashion. There wasn't any absentees there that night--not a single solitary one. They'd 'a' had to tie me hand and foot to keep me frum comin' there to show off my new grey suit and my red-striped sash and all my brass buttons.