grape and the grain abundantly during the war. I remember thinking
General Grant, who could not have been more than forty, a pretty well
preserved old chap, considering his habits. As to men of middle age--say
from fifty to sixty--why, they all looked fit to personate the Last of
the Hittites, or the Madagascarene Methuselah, in a museum. Depend upon
it, my friends, men of that time were greatly younger than men are
to-day, but looked much older. The change is quite remarkable.

I said that practical joking had not then gone out of fashion. It had
not, at least, in the army; though possibly in the more serious life of
the civilian it had no place except in the form of tarring and
feathering an occasional "copperhead." You all know, I suppose, what a
"copperhead" was, so I will go directly at my story without introductory
remark, as is my way.

It was a few days before the battle of Nashville. The enemy had driven
us up out of northern Georgia and Alabama. At Nashville we had turned at
bay and fortified, while old Pap Thomas, our commander, hurried down
reinforcements and supplies from Louisville. Meantime Hood, the
Confederate commander, had partly invested us and lay close enough to
have tossed shells into the heart of the town. As a rule he
abstained--he was afraid of killing the families of his own soldiers, I
suppose, a great many of whom had lived there. I sometimes wondered what
were the feelings of those fellows, gazing over our heads at their own
dwellings, where their wives and children or their aged parents were
perhaps suffering for the necessaries of life, and certainly (so their
reasoning would run) cowering under the tyranny and power of the
barbarous Yankees.

To begin, then, at the beginning, I was serving at that time on the
staff of a division commander whose name I shall not disclose, for I am
relating facts, and the person upon whom they bear hardest may have
surviving relatives who would not care to have him traced. Our
headquarters were in a large dwelling which stood just behind our line
of works. This had been hastily abandoned by the civilian occupants, who
had left everything pretty much as it was--had no place to store it,
probably, and trusted that Heaven would preserve it from Federal
cupidity and Confederate artillery. With regard to the latter we were as
solicitous as they.

Rummaging about in some of the chambers and closets one evening, some of
us found an abundant supply of lady-gear--gowns, shawls, bonnets, hats,
petticoats and the Lord knows what; I could not at that time have named
the half of it. The sight of all this pretty plunder inspired one of us
with what he was pleased to call an "idea," which, when submitted to the
other scamps and scapegraces of the staff, met with instant and
enthusiastic approval. We proceeded at once to act upon it for the
undoing of one of our comrades.

Our selected victim was an aide, Lieutenant Haberton, so to call him. He
was a good soldier--as gallant a chap as ever wore spurs; but he had an
intolerable weakness: he was a lady-killer, and like most of his class,
even in those days, eager that all should know it. He never tired of
relating his amatory exploits, and I need not say how dismal that kind
of narrative is to all but the narrator. It would be dismal even if
sprightly and vivacious, for all men are rivals in woman's favor, and to
relate your successes to another man is to rouse in him a dumb
resentment, tempered by disbelief. You will not convince him that you
tell the tale for his entertainment; he will hear nothing in it but an
expression of your own vanity. Moreover, as most men, whether rakes or
not, are willing to be thought rakes, he is very likely to resent a
stupid and unjust inference which he suspects you to have drawn from his
reticence in the matter of his own adventures--namely, that he has had
none. If, on the other hand, he has had no scruple in the matter and his
reticence is due to lack of opportunity to talk, or of nimbleness in
taking advantage of it, why, then he will be surly because you "have the
floor" when he wants it himself. There are, in short, no circumstances
under which a man, even from the best of motives, or no motive at all,
can relate his feats of love without distinctly lowering himself in the
esteem of his male auditor; and herein lies a just punishment for such
as kiss and tell. In my younger days I was myself not entirely out of
favor with the ladies, and have a memory stored with much concerning
them which doubtless I might put into acceptable narrative had I not
undertaken another tale, and if it were not my practice to relate one
thing at a time, going straight away to the end, without digression.

Lieutenant Haberton was, it must be confessed, a singularly handsome man
with engaging manners. He was, I suppose, judging from the imperfect
view-point of my sex, what women call "fascinating." Now, the qualities
which make a man attractive to ladies entail a double disadvantage.
First, they are of a sort readily discerned by other men, and by none
more readily than by those who lack them. Their possessor, being feared
by all these, is habitually slandered by them in self-defense. To all
the ladies in whose welfare they deem themselves entitled to a voice and
interest they hint at the vices and general unworth of the "ladies' man"
in no uncertain terms, and to their wives relate without shame the most
monstrous falsehoods about him. Nor are they restrained by the
consideration that he is their friend; the qualities which have engaged
their own admiration make it necessary to warn away those to whom the
allurement would be a peril. So the man of charming personality, while
loved by all the ladies who know him well, yet not too well, must endure
with such fortitude as he may the consciousness that those others who
know him only "by reputation" consider him a shameless reprobate, a
vicious and unworthy man--a type and example of moral depravity. To name
the second disadvantage entailed by his charms: he commonly is.

In order to get forward with our busy story (and in my judgment a story
once begun should not suffer impedition) it is necessary to explain that
a young fellow attached to our headquarters as an orderly was notably
effeminate in face and figure. He was not more than seventeen and had a