past apathetic crowds, nine-tenths
of whom had been born since the war--in foreign lands mainly; and at
least half, if one might judge by their looks, did not know what the
parading was all about, and did not particularly care either.

The corporal had not participated in the march of the veterans; he had
not even attended the banquet that followed it. True, the youngest
grandchild was at the moment cutting one of her largest jaw teeth and so
had required, for the time, an extraordinary and special amount of
minding; but the young lady's dental difficulty was not the sole reason
for his absence. Three weeks earlier the corporal had taken part in
Decoration Day, and certainly one parade a month was ample strain upon a
pair of legs such as he owned. He had returned home with his game leg
behaving more gamely then usual and with his sound one full of new and
painful kinks. Also, in honor of the occasion he had committed the error
of wearing a pair of stiff and inflexible new shoes; wherefore he had
worn his carpet slippers ever since.

Missing the fiftieth anniversary was not the main point with the
corporal--that was merely the fortune of war, to be accepted with
fortitude and with no more than a proper and natural amount of grumbling
by one who had been a good soldier and was now a good citizen; but for
days before the event, and daily ever since, divers members of the old
regiment had been writing pieces to the papers--the German papers and
the English-printing papers too--long pieces, telling of the trip to
Washington, and then on into Virginia and Tennessee, speaking of this
campaign and that and this battle and that. And because there was just
now a passing wave of interest in Civil War matters, the papers had
printed these contributions, thereby reflecting much glory on the
writers thereof. But Corporal Speck, reading these things, had marveled
deeply that sane men should have such disgustingly bad memories; for his
own recollection of these stirring and epochal events differed most
widely from the reminiscent narration of each misguided chronicler.

It was, indeed, a shameful thing that the most important occurrences of
the whole war should be so shockingly mangled and mishandled in the
retelling. They were so grievously wrong, those other veterans, and he
was so absolutely right. He was always right in these matters. Only the
night before, during a merciful respite from his nursing duties, he
had, in Otto Witten