serious wound was to invest the
war with a breathless and all-absorbing interest. It was now no longer
"make believe," but deadly earnest. Blood had flowed; insults had been
exchanged in due order, and offended honor cried for vengeance.

It was fortunate that the river divided the West-Siders from the
East-Siders, or it would have been difficult to tell what might
have happened. Viggo Hook, the West-Side general, was a handsome,
high-spirited lad of fifteen, who was the last person to pocket an
injury, as long as red blood flowed in his veins, as he was wont to
express it. He was the eldest son of Colonel Hook of the regular army,
and meant some day to be a Von Moltke or a Napoleon. He felt in his
heart that he was destined for something great; and in conformity with
this conviction assumed a superb behavior, which his comrades found very
admirable.

He had the gift of leadership in a marked degree, and established his
authority by a due mixture of kindness and severity. Those boys whom he
honored with his confidence were absolutely attached to him. Those whom,
with magnificent arbitrariness, he punished and persecuted, felt meekly
that they had probably deserved it; and if they had not, it was somehow
in the game.

There never was a more absolute king than Viggo, nor one more abjectly
courted and admired. And the amusing part of it was that he was at heart
a generous and good-natured lad, but possessed with a lofty ideal of
heroism, which required above all things that whatever he said or did
must be striking. He dramatized, as it were, every phrase he uttered and
every act he performed, and modelled himself alternately after Napoleon
and Wellington, as he had seen them represented in the old engravings
which decorated the walls in his father's study.

He had read much about heroes of war, ancient and modern, and he lived
about half his own life imagining himself by turns all sorts of grand
characters from history or fiction.

His costume was usually in keeping with his own conception of these
characters, in so far as his scanty opportunities permitted. An old,
broken sword of his father's, which had been polished until it "flashed"
properly, was girded to a brass-mounted belt about his waist; an
ancient, gold-braided, military cap, which was much too large, covered
his curly head; and four tarnished brass buttons, displaying the Golden
Lion of Norway, gave a martial air to his blue jacket, although the rest
we