for a seat, and the head of his drum for a
desk, he was writing a letter to his mother, by a solitary candle, around
which his comrades were playing cards on a table constructed of a rough
board and four sticks. Amid the confusion of laughter and disputes, with
heads or arms continually intervening between him and the uncertain
light, he was pursuing his task through difficulties which would have
made many a boy give up in vexation and despair, when a voice suddenly
exclaimed, with startling emphasis,--

"Frank Manly, drummer!" And at the same instant something was thrown into
the tent, like a bombshell, passing the table, knocking over the candle,
and extinguishing the light.

"Well, that's manners, I should say," cried the voice of Seth Tucket, a
fellow, as Frank described him, "who makes lots of fun for us, partly
because he is full of it himself, and partly because he is green, and
don't know any better." Tucket muttered and spat, then broke forth again,
"I be darned ef that pesky football didn't take me right in the face, and
spatter my mouth full of taller."

"Well, save the _taller_, Seth, for we're getting short of candles," said
Frank. "Here, who is walking on my feet?"

"It's me," said Atwater. "I'm going out to see who threw that thing in."

"You're too late," said Frank. "Strike a light, somebody, and let's see
what it is. It tumbled down here by my drum, I believe."

There was a general scratching of matches, and after a while the broken
candle was set up and relighted.

"I swan to man," then said Tucket, "jest look at that jack-of-spades. He
got it in the physiognomy wus'n I did. 'Alas, the mother that him bare,
if she had been in presence there, in his _greased cheeks_ and _greasier
hair_, she had not known her child.'"

These words from Marmion, aptly altered to suit the occasion, Seth, who
was not so green but that he knew pages of poetry by heart, repeated in a
high-keyed, nasal sing-song, which set all the boys laughing.

"A pretty way, too, to _turn up_ Jack, I should say," he added, in
allusion to the candlestick,--a _turnip_, with a hole in it,--which had
rolled over his cards.

In the mean time, Frank and Jack Winch were scrambling for the missile.

"Let me have it," snarled Jack.

"It's mine; my name was called when it was flung in," said Frank,
maintaining his hold.

"Well, keep it, then!" said John. "It's nothing but a great wad of
paper."

"It's a torpedo! an infernal machine