ual.

The boys had their own ideas of what that cannon could do if aptly fired
into a force of British, or Bridish, as they called them. They wished
there could be a war with England, just to see; and their national
feeling was kept hot by the presence of veterans of the War of 1812 at
all the celebrations. One of the boys had a grandfather who had been in
the Revolutionary War, and when he died the Butler Guards fired a salute
over his grave. It was secret sorrow and sometimes open shame to my boy
that his grandfather should be an Englishman, and that even his father
should have been a year old when he came to this country; but on his
mother's side he could boast a grandfather and a great-grandfather who
had taken part, however briefly or obscurely, in both the wars against
Great Britain. He hated just as much as any of the boys, or perhaps
more, to be the Bridish when they were playing war, and he longed as
truly as any of them to march against the hereditary, or
half-hereditary, enemy.

Playing war was one of the regular plays, and the sides were always
Americans and Bridish, and the Bridish always got whipped. But this was
a different thing, and a far less serious thing, than having a company.
The boys began to have companies after every muster, of course; but
sometimes they began to have them for no external reason. Very likely
they would start having a company from just finding a rooster's
tail-feather, and begin making plumes at once. It was easy to make a
plume: you picked up a lot of feathers that the hens and geese had
dropped; and you whittled a pine stick, and bound the feathers in
spirals around it with white thread. That was a first-rate plume, but
the uniform offered the same difficulties as the circus dress, and you
could not do anything towards it by rolling up your pantaloons. It was
pretty easy to make swords out of laths, but guns again were hard to
realize. Some fellows had little toy guns left over from Christmas, but
they were considered rather babyish, and any kind of stick was better;
the right kind of a gun for a boy's company was a wooden gun, such as
some of the big boys had, with the barrel painted different from the
stock. The little fellows never had any such guns, and if the question
of uniform could have been got over, this question of arms would still
have remained. In these troubles the fellows' mothers had to suffer
almost as much as the fellows themselves, the fellows teased them so