eir caps, which had not the sign of a feather in them. It was a
consolation to know that they were going to fight the Mexicans; not so
much consolation as if it had been the Bridish, though still something.
The boys were proud of them, and they did not realize that most of these
poor fellows were just country-jakes. Somehow they effaced even the
Butler Guards in their fancy, though the Guards paraded with them, in
all their splendor, as escort.

But this civic satisfaction was alloyed for my boy by the consciousness
that both his father and his grandfather abhorred the war that the
volunteers were going to. His grandfather, as an Abolitionist, and his
father, as a Henry Clay Whig, had both been opposed to the annexation of
Texas (which the boy heard talked of without knowing in the least what
annexation meant), and they were both of the mind that the war growing
out of it was wanton and wicked. His father wrote against it in every
number of his paper, and made himself hated among its friends, who were
the large majority in the Boy's Town. My boy could not help feeling that
his father was little better than a Mexican, and whilst his filial love
was hurt by things that he heard to his disadvantage, he was not sure
that he was not rightly hated. It gave him a trouble of mind that was
not wholly appeased by some pieces of poetry that he used to hear his
father reading and quoting at that time, with huge enjoyment. The pieces
were called "The Biglow Papers," and his father read them out of a
Boston newspaper, and thought them the wisest and wittiest things that
ever were. The boy always remembered how he recited the lines--

"Ez fur war, I call it murder--
There ye hev it plain and flat;
'N I don't want to go no furder
Then my Testament fur that.
God hez said so plump and fairly:
It's as long as it is broad;
And ye'll hev to git up airly,
Ef ye want to take in God."

He thought this fine, too, but still, it seemed to him, in the narrow
little world where a child dwells, that his father and his grandfather
were about the only people there were who did not wish the Mexicans
whipped, and he felt secretly guilty for them before the other boys.

It was all the harder to bear because, up to this time, there had been
no shadow of difference about politics between him and the boys he went
with. They were Whig boys, and nearly all the