ers treat him well? Didn't
they seem to yearn for his society?" asked the grocery man, as the boy
was making a lunch on some sweet crackers in a tin cannister.

"Well, they were not very much mashed on Pa. You see, Pa never gets
tired telling us about how he fit in the army. For several years I
didn't know what a sutler was, and when Pa would tell about taking a
musket that a dead soldier had dropped, and going into the thickest of
the light, and fairly mowing down the rebels in swaths the way they cut
hay, I thought he was the greatest man that ever was. Until I was eleven
years old I thought Pa had killed men enough to fill the Forest Home
cemetery. I thought a sutler was something higher than a general, and
Pa used to talk about "I and Grant," and what Sheridan told him, and how
Sherman marched with him to the sea, and all that kind of rot, until
I wondered why they didn't have pictures of Pa on a white horse, with
epaulets on, and a sword. One day at school I told a boy that my Pa
killed more men than Grant, and the boy said he didn't doubt it, but he
killed them with commissary whiskey. The boy said his Pa was in the same
regiment that my Pa was sutler of, and his Pa said my Pa charged him
five dollars for a canteen of peppersauce and alcohol and called it
whiskey. Then I began to enquire into it, and found out that a sutler
was a sort of liquid peanut stand, and that his rank in the army was
about the same as a chestnut roaster on the sidewalk here at home. It
made me sick, and I never had the same respect for Pa after that. But
Pa, don't care. He thinks he is a hero, and tried to get a pension on
account of losing a piece of his thumb, but when the officers found he
was wounded by the explosion of a can of baked beans, they couldn't give
it to him. Pa was down town when the veterans were here, and I was with
him, and I saw a lot of old soldiers looking at Pa, and I told him they
acted as though they knew him, and he put on his glasses, and said to
one of them, "How are you Bill?" The soldier looked at Pa and called
the other soldiers, and one said, That's the old duffer that sold me the
bottle of brandy peaches at Chickamauga, for three dollars, and they eat
a hole through my stummick. Another said, 'He's the cuss that took ten
dollars out of my pay for pickles that were put up in _aqua fortis_.
Look at the corps badges he has on.' Another said, 'The old whelp!
He charged me fifty cents a pound for onions when I h