ss mounts the platform and
brays out something about the gallant boys in gray. The cry for
progress, for material advancement, for moral and social betterment, is
stifled, that everybody may have breath to shout for a flapping
trouser's leg worn by a degraded old sot. All that your Southern
statesmen have had to give a people who were stripped to the bone is
fulsome rhetoric about the Wounded Warrior of Wahoo, or some other
inflated nonentity, whereupon the mesmerized population have loyally
fallen on their faces and shouted, 'Praise the Lord.' And all the while
they were going through this wretched mummery, they were hungry and
thirsty and naked--destitute in a smiling land of plenty. Do you wonder
that I think old-soldierism is the meanest profession the Lord ever
suffered to thrive? I tell you Baal and Moloch never took such toll of
their idolaters as these shabby old gods of the gray shirt."

"Professor Nicolovius," said Queed, with a slow smile, "where on earth
do you exhume your ideas of Southern history?"

"Observation, my dear boy! God bless us, haven't I had three years of
this city to use my eyes and ears in? And I had a peculiar training in
my youth," he added, retrospectively, "to fit me to see straight and
generalize accurately."

... Couldn't the man see that no persecuted Irishman ever talked in such
a way since the world began? If he had a part to play, why in the name
of common sense couldn't he play it respectably?

Queed got up, and began strolling about the floor. In his mind was what
Sharlee Weyland had said to him two hours before: "All the bitterness
nowadays comes from the non-combatants, the camp-followers, the sutlers,
and the cowards." Under which of these heads did his friend, the old
professor, fall?... Why had he ever thought of Nicolovius as, perhaps, a
broken Union officer? A broken Union officer would feel bitter, if at
all, against the Union. A man who felt so bitter against the South--

A resolution was rapidly hardening in the young man's mind. He felt this
attitude of doubt and suspicion, these thoughts that he was now thinking
about the man whose roof he shared, as an unclean spot upon his chaste
passion for truth. He could not feel honest again until he had wiped it
off.... And, after all, what did he owe to Nicolovius?

"But I must not leave you under the impression," said Nicolovius, almost
testily for him, "that my ideas are unique and extraordinary. They are
shared, in fa