afterward? I read of it out in Missouri, where I was
stationed at the time, and I recollect the talk of some old army men
about it. They said that death-rate couldn't be beaten. I don't know
that it ever was."

"About one in five of us got out safe," said Lapham, breaking his
cigar-ash off on the edge of a plate. James Bellingham reached him a
bottle of Apollinaris. He drank a glass, and then went on smoking.

They all waited, as if expecting him to speak, and then Corey said:
"How incredible those things seem already! You gentlemen KNOW that
they happened; but are you still able to believe it?"

"Ah, nobody FEELS that anything happened," said Charles Bellingham.
"The past of one's experience doesn't differ a great deal from the past
of one's knowledge. It isn't much more probable; it's really a great
deal less vivid than some scenes in a novel that one read when a boy."

"I'm not sure of that," said James Bellingham.

"Well, James, neither am I," consented his cousin, helping himself from
Lapham's Apollinaris bottle. "There would be very little talking at
dinner if one only said the things that one was sure of."

The others laughed, and Bromfield Corey remarked thoughtfully, "What
astonishes the craven civilian in all these things is the
abundance--the superabundance--of heroism. The cowards were the
exception; the men that were ready to die, the rule."

"The woods were full of them," said Lapham, without taking his cigar
from his mouth.

"That's a nice little touch in School," interposed Charles Bellingham,
"where the girl says to the fellow who was at Inkerman, 'I should think
you would be so proud of it,' and he reflects a while, and says, 'Well,
the fact is, you know, there were so many of us.'"

"Yes, I remember that," said James Bellingham, smiling for pleasure in
it. "But I don't see why you claim the credit of being a craven
civilian, Bromfield," he added, with a friendly glance at his
brother-in-law, and with the willingness Boston men often show to turn
one another's good points to the light in company; bred so intimately
together at school and college and in society, they all know these
points. "A man who was out with Garibaldi in '48," continued James
Bellingham.

"Oh, a little amateur red-shirting," Corey interrupted in deprecation.
"But even if you choose to dispute my claim, what has become of all the
heroism? Tom, how many club men do you know who would think it sweet
and fitting