it.

* * * * *

On this same Sunday--or, anyhow, I like to fancy it was on this same
Sunday--at a point distant approximately nine hundred and seventy miles
in a northeasterly direction from Judge Priest's town, Corporal Jacob
Speck, late of Sigel's command, sat at the kitchen window of the
combined Speck and Engel apartment on East Eighty-fifth Street in the
Borough of Manhattan, New York. He was in his shirtsleeves; his tender
feet were incased in a pair of red-and-green carpet slippers. In the
angle of his left arm he held his youngest grandchild, aged one and a
half years, while his right hand carefully poised a china pipe, with a
bowl like an egg-cup and a stem like a fishpole. The corporal's blue
Hanoverian eyes, behind their thick-lensed glasses, were fixed upon a
comprehensive vista of East Eighty-fifth Street back yards and
clothespoles and fire escapes; but his thoughts were very much
elsewhere.

Reared back there at seeming ease, the corporal none the less was not
happy in his mind. It was not that he so much minded being left at home
to mind the youngest baby while the rest of the family spent the
afternoon amid the Teutonic splendors of Smeltzer's Harlem River Casino,
with its acres of gravel walks and its whitewashed tree trunks, its
straggly flower beds and its high-collared beers. He was used to that
sort of thing. Since a plague of multiplying infirmities of the body
had driven him out of his job in the tax office, the corporal had not
done much except nurse the babies that occurred in the Speck-Engel
establishment with such unerring regularity. Sometimes, it is true, he
did slip down to the corner for maybe zwei glasses of beer and a game of
pinocle; but then, likely as not, there would come inopportunely a
towheaded descendant to tell him Mommer needed him back at the flat
right away to mind the baby while she went marketing or to the movies.

He could endure that--he had to. What riled Corporal Jacob Speck on this
warm and sunny Sunday was a realization that he was not doing his share
at making the history of the period. The week before had befallen the
fiftieth anniversary of the marching away of his old regiment to the
front; there had been articles in the daily papers about it. Also, in
patriotic commemoration of the great event there had been a parade of
the wrinkled survivors--ninety-odd of them--following their tattered and
faded battle flag down Fifth Avenue