ng the officer to the President
of the United States, declaring the victim a model citizen, sober and
peaceable, and the captain drunk, foul-mouthed, and abusive. The press
of the neighborhood aided in spreading abroad the utterly false report
of the affair, with the usual result of the temporary humiliation and
distress of the officer and his friends, the inevitable official
investigation, and the prompt verdict, "The officer deserves
commendation, not condemnation." One paper, within five days of its
original report, announced that it had discovered that it was the
civilian who was drunk and who used the foul language attributed to the
officer. It furthermore said that the officer had done just right; but
this was the single and phenomenal instance. The other papers, like
Elmendorf, probably reasoned that if the officer wasn't the blackguard
they had striven to make him appear, he might as well have been.

These are specimens of experiences too well known to all concerned. "May
the Lord preserve us from any more riot duty!" said Kenyon, piously, as
they steamed away across the Illinois prairies; "but," he added, "I'll
bet ten dollars to ten cents the politicians will get us into more and
worse another year."

Yet even such scenes have their humorous side. It was Daniel O'Connell,
I believe, who defeated the female champion of Billingsgate by calmly
referring to her as the hypothenuse of a right-angled triangle, which
was something utterly beyond her powers of repartee: it was he, at all
events, who silenced another virago with the cutting response, "Sure
every one knows, ma'am, ye're no better than a parallelogram, and you
keep a whole parallelopipedon concealed in your closet at home;" and it
was one of the trimmest, nattiest, most punctilious of our captains who
stood in front of the silent ranks, listening in apparently absorbed
attention to the furious tirade lavished on him by the spokeswoman of
the mob, a street drab of uncommon stature and powers of expression and
command of expletive. Winding up a three-minute speech with the remark,
"I could pick ye up and ate ye, only the taste would turn me stomach,
you white-livered, blue-bellied son of a scut," the lady had to pause
for breath, and the soldier looked up from under his hat-brim and
mildly remarked, "Madam, you're prejudiced," whereat even some of her
sympathizers forgot their rancor and roared with laughter, and the
idolatrous rank of his soldiery doubled